fipa-00037-communicative-act-library

What problem does it solve?

Agents in distributed systems need a principled way to choose what messages to send, how to route them, and how to recover when coordination fails; this Skill provides formal decision rules and patterns grounded in the FIPA Communicative Act Library to remove guesswork from multi-agent messaging design.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Act selection decision trees for selecting inform, request, query-if, query-ref, confirm, disconfirm, refuse, failure, and not-understood based on sender/receiver mental states.
• Federation and routing guidance for proxying, propagation, and store-and-forward patterns when agents are not directly reachable.
• Failure and recovery patterns including explicit refuse/failure handling, timeout strategies, and cancellation/cleanup protocols.
• Compositional action expressions for building query-if, inform-if, inform-ref, subscribe, and Contract Net–style interactions from small primitives.
• Use Case: designing or debugging an orchestrator that must request work from heterogeneous autonomous agents while avoiding duplicate work, handling refusals, and recovering from failed attempts.

Quick Start

Ask the skill to "Recommend the appropriate FIPA communicative act and fallback strategy for requesting a long-running computation from an autonomous worker that may refuse or time out."