FOUNDATION FOR INTELLIGENT PHYSICAL AGENTS

FIPA Failure Communicative Act Specification

Document title	FIPA Failure Communicative Act Specification
Document number	DC00045A	Document source	FIPA TC C
Document status	Deprecated	Date of this status	2000/10/16
Supersedes	None
Contact	fab@fipa.org
Change history
2000/10/16	Deprecated by FIPA00037

Geneva, Switzerland

Notice

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Foreword

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Contents

1 Scope. 1

2 Failure. 2

3 References. 3

1 Scope

This document specifies the Failure communicative act which is compliant to [FIPA00037] requirements.

2 Failure

Summary	The action of telling another agent that an action was attempted but the attempt failed.
Content	A tuple, consisting of an action expression and a proposition giving the reason for the failure.
Description	The failure act is an abbreviation for informing that an act was considered feasible by the sender, but was not completed for some given reason. The agent receiving a failure act is entitled to believe that: · the action has not been done, and, · the action is (or, at the time the agent attempted to perform the action, was) feasible The (causal) reason for the refusal is represented by the proposition, which is the third term of the tuple. It may be the constant true. Often it is the case that there is little either agent can do to further the attempt to perform the action.
Formal Model	<i, failure(j, a, f)>º <i, inform(j, ($e) Single(e) Ù Done(e, Feasible(a) Ù I_i Done(a)) Ù f Ù ØDone(a) Ù ØI_i Done(a))> FP: B_i a Ù ØB_i (Bif_j a Ú Uif_j a) RE: B_j a Where: a = ($e) Single(e) Ù Done(e, Feasible(a) Ù I_i Done(a)) Ù f Ù ØDone(a) Ù ØI_i Done(a) Agent i informs agent j that, in the past, i had the intention to do action a and a was feasible. i performed the action of attempting to do a, that is, the action/event e is the attempt to do a, but now a has not been done and i no longer has the intention to do a, and f is true. The informal implication is that f is the reason that the action failed, though this causality is not expressed formally in the semantic model.
Example	Agent j informs i that it has failed to open a file. (failure :sender j :receiver i :content ((action j "open( \"foo.txt\” )") (error-message "No such file: foo.txt")) :language FIPA-SL)

3 References

[FIPA00037] FIPA Communicative Act Library Specification. Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents, 2000. http://www.fipa.org/specs/fipa00037/