Inter-agent communication in a FIPA compliant intelligent distributed dynamic-information system

This paper describes a traffic surveillance system as a particular case of the class of intelligent distributed dynamic-information systems (IDDIS). The Traffic Surveillance System is a vision-based FIPA compliant multi-agent system that uses the FIPA Agent Communication Language (ACL) and the FIPA Semantic Language (SL). The focus of the work is inter-agent communication and coordination. We have extended the SL expressiveness with respect to the representation of uncertainty and to the representation of ad hoc MPEG7 descriptions. We propose a transport encoding format more suitable for time-constrained systems than the original textual format proposed in the FIPA specifications. We show that, within the scope of the FIPA platform, the FIPA ACL is a communication language powerful enough to achieve multi-agent coordination through communication. This work also suggests that the FIPA platform is suitable for building surveillance based applications.