Agent Communication Channel

Overview

According to fipa specification, each agent platform is expected to have an Agent Communication Channel (ACC). This component is in charge of forwarding messages to remote or local agents.

Implemented functionalities

Message Envelope

• Mandatory fields: to, from, date and acl-representation
• Optional fields : comments, playload-length, playload-encoding, intended-receiver, received and transport-behaviour
• Support user-defined fields
• Support multiple occurrences of the same field

Received Object

• Mandatory fields: by and date
• Optional fields: from, id and via
• User-defined fields

ACC

• Message forwarding
  • intended-receiver empty, single AID in to field
  • intended-receiver empty, multiple AIDs in to field
  • Single intended-receiver field
  • Multiple intended-receiver fields
  • received field filled on forwarding
• Single receiver
  • One transport address specified
  • Multiple transport addresses
• Multiple receivers
• AID resolution using the resolvers parameters of AID
• Error and Confirmation messages

Out of scope

Given the complexity of the specification, this PR won't cover all described functionalities. Uncovered are:

• Message Transport Service: querying MTS policies and capabilities
• Message Transport Protocol: only interface, no concrete implementation
• Concrete representations of Envelope

Edit: 04/01

This two functionalities have been marked 'Out of scope' due to missing functionalities such as FIPA-SL or fully operational AMS:

• AID resolution using the resolvers parameters of AID
• Error and Confirmation messages

Those functionalities will be developed in a separated PR.