What is agent communication?

Communication is necessary in order to allow collaboration, negotiation, cooperation, etc… between independent entities. For this purpose, it requires a well-defined, agreed and commonly understood semantics. Therefore, there cannot be any interoperability without standards.
Agent communication is based on message passing, where agents communicate by formulating and sending individual messages to each other. The FIPA ACL specifies a standard message language by setting out the encoding, semantics and pragmatics of the messages. The standard does not set out a specific mechanism for the internal transportation of messages. Instead, since different agents might run on different platforms and use different networking technologies, FIPA just specifies how transporting and encoding the messages between different remote platforms. The syntax of the ACL is very close to the KQML communication language.