Experiences in the use of FIPA agent technologies for the

In this paper we report upon the experiences gained during the development of a FIPA compliant travel application as part of the FACTS project. FACTS is an EU-sponsored, collaborative project whose objective is to evaluate the set of FIPA agent communication standards in real-life applications. The domain chosen for this test is the Personal Travel Market. In this electronic marketplace, three types of agents (Personal Travel Agent, Travel Broker Agent and Travel Service Agent) collaborate to resolve travel requirements for a human user. The application has been developed upon two independently developed FIPA agent platforms, and the three types of agents have also been independently developed. Furthermore the application incorporates such features as adaptive learning, planning, service composition and access to Internet Web resources. Work is ongoing in the areas of wireless access and secure payments. The results to date are very encouraging, as the FIPA standards have proved very useful in the integration of independently developed, FIPA-compliant software components. We also make observations upon some areas of weakness within the FIPA specifications