The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) was established almost ten years ago to develop software standards for heterogeneous and interacting agents and agent-based systems. It successfully developed and published a very good set of standards for agent communication and agent infrastructure. The last several years has seen a gradual decline in paying members, fewer technical people able to devote time and a general loss of momentum.

This fall the FIPA board decided to close down FIPA as a Swiss-based organization and find a sponsor to help maintain and develop the FIPA standards. The membership voted to follow this course and discussions were held with a number of candidate organizations. The IEEE Computer Society invited FIPA to become part of its family of standards committees and working groups. In March, the FIPA membership voted to join as the “FIPA Standards Committee”. This committee will be a self-organizing body with its own policies and procedures, dues structures, and bank account within the IEEE. The IEEE Computer Society will provide the umbrella organization, website maintenance, voting support, and all the other benefits that a large standards organization provides.

FIPA was an exciting experiment and perhaps a bit ahead of its time. I think that joining IEEE is a good decision and am optimistic that this will provide a new home for FIPA’s ideas and standards to evolve as new technologies appear and mature. The agents vision is still the right one, IMHO, and FIPA’s good work will be needed soon.

Related posts:

1. FIPA as an IEEE standards committee
2. First FIPA IEEE meetings
3. IEEE FIPA agents standards meeting 13 Sept 2006
4. IEEE FIPA to meet at CIA 2006
5. New FIPA/OMG standards for agents