FIPA Standards
The IEEE Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents is the relevant for standards body for interoperability of agents and multiagent systems. Aimpulse Spectrum supports agent communication following the FIPA messaging standards.
In contrast to other FIPA-compatible systems, Aimpulse Spectrum is not considered as a dedicated FIPA agent platform. Instead, it is designed as a more general environment for executing and evaluating parallel interacting processes. As a consequence, Spectrum does not support FIPA specialities such as distributed agent systems or agent mobility.
FIPA Agent Communication Language
Messages in Aimpulse Spectrum follow the structure of the FIPA Agent Communication Language (ACL). Programmers can use both FIPA-standardized and user-defined communicative acts.
The default textual representation for messages in Spectrum is the FIPA-standardized XML dialect. As there are manifold tools to process XML (such as XSLT), it is thus possible to easily transform messages into any other representation.
FIPA Agent Interaction Protocols
Interaction protocols are an important means to further structure agent communication. Aimpulse Spectrum is shipped with default implementations for two of the most popular FIPA protocols, namely the Request and the Contract Net Interaction Protocols.