FOUNDATION FOR INTELLIGENT PHYSICAL AGENTS

FIPA Request Interaction Protocol Specification

Document title	FIPA Request Interaction Protocol Specification
Document number	XC00026G	Document source	FIPA TC Communication
Document status	Experimental	Date of this status	2002/11/01
Supersedes	None
Contact	fab@fipa.org
Change history	See Informative Annex A — ChangeLog

Notice

Use of the technologies described in this specification may infringe patents, copyrights or other intellectual property rights of FIPA Members and non-members. Nothing in this specification should be construed as granting permission to use any of the technologies described. Anyone planning to make use of technology covered by the intellectual property rights of others should first obtain permission from the holder(s) of the rights. FIPA strongly encourages anyone implementing any part of this specification to determine first whether part(s) sought to be implemented are covered by the intellectual property of others, and, if so, to obtain appropriate licenses or other permission from the holder(s) of such intellectual property prior to implementation. This specification is subject to change without notice. Neither FIPA nor any of its Members accept any responsibility whatsoever for damages or liability, direct or consequential, which may result from the use of this specification.

Foreword

The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) is an international organization that is dedicated to promoting the industry of intelligent agents by openly developing specifications supporting interoperability among agents and agent-based applications. This occurs through open collaboration among its member organizations, which are companies and universities that are active in the field of agents. FIPA makes the results of its activities available to all interested parties and intends to contribute its results to the appropriate formal standards bodies where appropriate.

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The FIPA specifications are developed through direct involvement of the FIPA membership. The status of a specification can be either Preliminary, Experimental, Standard, Deprecated or Obsolete. More detail about the process of specification may be found in the FIPA Document Policy [f-out-00000] and the FIPA Specifications Policy [f-out-00003]. A complete overview of the FIPA specifications and their current status may be found on the FIPA Web site.

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Contents

1 FIPA Request Interaction Protocol 1

1.1 Explanation of the Protocol Flow. 1

1.2 Exceptions to Protocol Flow. 2

2 References. 4

3 Informative Annex A — ChangeLog. 5

3.1 2002/11/01 - version G by TC X2S. 5

1 FIPA Request Interaction Protocol

The FIPA Request Interaction Protocol (IP) allows one agent to request another to perform some action.

The representation of this protocol is given in Figure 1 which is based on extensions to UML 1.x. [Odell2001]. This protocol is identified by the token fipa-request as the value of the protocol parameter of the ACL message.

Figure 1: FIPA Request Interaction Protocol

1.1 Explanation of the Protocol Flow

The FIPA Request Interaction Protocol (IP) allows one agent to request another to perform some action. The Participant processes the request and makes a decision whether to accept or refuse the request. If a refuse decision is made, then “refused” becomes true and the Participant communicates a refuse. Otherwise, “agreed” becomes true.

If conditions indicate that an explicit agreement is required (that is, “notification necessary” is true), then the Participant communicates an agree. The agree may be optional depending on circumstances, for example, if the requested action is very quick and can happen before a time specified in the reply-by parameter. Once the request has been agreed upon, then the Participant must communicate either:

· A failure if it fails in its attempt to fill the request,

· An inform-done if it successfully completes the request and only wishes to indicate that it is done, or,

· An inform-result if it wishes to indicate both that it is done and notify the initiator of the results.

Any interaction using this interaction protocol is identified by a globally unique, non-null conversation-id parameter, assigned by the Initiator. The agents involved in the interaction must tag all of its ACL messages with this conversation identifier. This enables each agent to manage its communication strategies and activities, for example, it allows an agent to identify individual conversations and to reason across historical records of conversations.

1.2 Exceptions to Protocol Flow

At any point in the IP, the receiver of a communication can inform the sender that it did not understand what was communicated. This is accomplished by returning a not-understood message. As such, Figure 1 does not depict a not-understood communication as it can occur at any point in the IP. The communication of a not-understood within an interaction protocol may terminate the entire IP and termination of the interaction may imply that any commitments made during the interaction are null and void.

At any point in the IP, the initiator of the IP may cancel the interaction protocol by initiating the meta-protocol shown in Figure 2. The conversation-id parameter of the cancel interaction is identical to the conversation-id parameter of the interaction that the Initiator intends to cancel. The semantics of cancel should roughly be interpreted as meaning that the initiator is no longer interested in continuing the interaction and that it should be terminated in a manner acceptable to both the Initiator and the Participant. The Participant either informs the Initiator that the interaction is done using an inform-done or indicates the failure of the cancellation using a failure.

Figure 2: FIPA Cancel Meta-Protocol

This IP is a pattern for a simple interaction type. Elaboration on this pattern will almost certainly be necessary in order to specify all cases that might occur in an actual agent interaction. Real world issues such as the effects of cancelling actions, asynchrony, abnormal or unexpected IP termination, nested IPs, and the like, are explicitly not addressed here.

2 References

[Odell2001] Odell, James, Van Dyke Parunak, H. and Bauer, B., Representing Agent Interaction Protocols in UML. In: Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, Ciancarini, P. and Wooldridge, M., Eds., Springer, pp. 121-140, Berlin, 2001.
http://www.fipa.org/docs/input/f-in-00077/

3 Informative Annex A — ChangeLog

3.1 2002/11/01 - version G by TC X2S

Page 1, Figure 1: The communication labeled inform-ref was changed to inform-result for clarity; the purpose of this communication is to inform the initiator of a result and inform-result implies inform-done

Page 1, Figure 1: The not-understood communication was removed

Page 1, Figure 1: Reworked the protocol flow to make the agree optional which also involved changing the exclusive-or with the agree to a different AUML notation

Page 1, Figure 1: To conform to UML 2, the protocol name was placed in a boundary, x is removed from the diamonds (xor is now the default) and the template box was removed

Page 1, line 41: Reworked and expanded the section description of the IP

Page 1, line 50: Added a new section on Explanation of Protocol Flow

Page 1, line 50: Reworked and expanded the section on Exceptions of Protocol Flow to incorporate a meta-protocol for cancel

Page 1, line 50: Added a paragraph explaining the not-understood communication and its relationship with the IP