Participation to the FIPA Opening meeting

CCETT and SEPT are part of the CNET research center of France Telecom, and have been involved, for a couple of years, in the development, experimentation, and evaluation of different agent technologies in various contexts: telematic services (mediation, information retrieval), messaging services and their integration with existing technologies (CORBA, Chorus-Cool micro-kernel development) or services (Teletel, X.400).

The present contribution comes from two distinct departments of CCETT and SEPT, concerned with agent-based services, brokering, and implementation over existing technologies.

At CCETT and SEPT, the mobile agent technology has been mainly investigated with the Telescript technology provided by the General Magic company through the development and the deployment of an experimental service designed for a specific marketing target. Agent technology is currently viewed as a means for providing users with advanced services making use of the main characteristics of that kind of agents : mobility, remote execution, watching, finding and orchestration.

Along these lines, our interests in the scope of FIPA are twofolds:

1/ Software agents for applicative services:

Declaration, research and brokering of end-user services , based on sophisticated directories enabling the development of advanced information services.

Development of generic models and frameworks for agent based services including quality of service (transaction processing), security, billing, administration and routing issues in a distributed and heterogeneous environment.

Communication model between a mobile agent and its owner (and the reverse) through external and existing communications means.

2/ Common execution framework and interoperability:

Common support for agent execution and migration (mobile agents), based on existing networks and protocols (internet, Web protocol), services directories based on object standards (CORBA, TINA-C, ODP, X.500...), interoperability, bridging with existing applications, security protocols (authentication, secure billing)

In this context, FIPA could be an adequate framework for identifying and/or defining standard descriptions for agent capabilities, competence domains, and communication interfaces, with other agents.

H. THOMAS *, A. LEGER *, P. MORAND**
France Telecom

* CCETT
4, rue du Clos Courtel - BP 59 -
35512 CESSON SEVIGNE CEDEX - FRANCE
tel: +33 99 12 41 11, fax +33 99 12 40 98
Henry.Thomas@ccett.fr
Alain.Leger@ccett.fr

** SEPT
42 rue des Coutures,
BP 6243
14066 CAEN CEDEX - FRANCE
Phone : +33 31 75 91 79 / Fax : +33 31 73 56 26 / eMail : pierrick.morand@sept.fr

Participants:

Alain LEGER (PhD, Ing.) is head of a R&D department in CCETT (ARM department) which is in charge of the studies on mediation services for On Line Services.
He has been head of a CNET project (94) of prototyping of Agent-based services using the General Magic technology. He has been deeply involved in the standardization process in ISO, ETSI and IUT for the development of the standard JPEG, MHEG and the Videotex in Europe. He had been head of a R&D group for consumer TV in Thomson (72-80).

Henry THOMAS (PhD, Ing.) is part of the ARM departement which is in charge of the studies on mediation services for On Line Services.. He works within CCETT onto the subject of agents for users services. His works focus on providing integrated services for ISP and end-users on a software agents basis, for integration with France Telecom on-line services.

Pierrick MORAND is part of the "Distributed Application of Electronic Mail" department (SEPT/SCE/ACS). He is currently responsible for integrating the developments of an experimental agent based service called Pyramide. In the past years, he has been involved in the European CTS2-XMHS project, in IUT X.480, 481 & 482 recommandations and in the development & design of a collaborative document production software based on X.400 within a groupware CNET project.