From Interoperability to Cooperation: Building Intelligent Agents on Middleware

As agent technologies are increasingly being involved in telecommunication-related applications, the need for open standards is becoming critical. During the past years, different scientific communities gave birth to different standardization actions, such as the Foundation for Physical Intelligent Agents (FIPA) and the Object Management Group's MASIF (Mobile Agent System Interoperability Facilities). Although they finally share some major targets, the OMG and FIPA current results show their distinct origins, respectively with a Distributed Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems awareness on the one hand, and a telecommunication and information technologies background on the other hand. In a context where these two actions think about joining their achievements to upgrade each other, this article reports several experiments, carried out during the five past years in the agent platforms field, mixing both the intelligence and the middleware aspects.