Development and deployment of a multi-agent system for public service access

In this paper we summarise the technology developments and results of a large-scale hardware and software technology development that required both multimedia and multi-agents. The KIMSAC project (a European acts project Kiosk-based Integrated Multimedia System Access to Citizens) started in September 95 with the vision of using the Personal Service Assistant Metaphor to provide public services to a variety of users. The project anticipated that the users would be of varying ages, education and technology awareness as the application to be supported included social services (e.g. income support) and employment services (e.g. finding jobs and training courses). Hence any solution would have to support a diverse set of users and be able to support distributed information and service access. The distributed solution was required as the two user organisations supporting the domain requirements were independent government organisations, the hardware and location requirements, the development partners themselves were distributed over five major European countries and the end-user was the public. The KIMSAC solution was tested on two sets of real user trials based in Ireland. Trial 1 completed in June 97 and the second trial started July 98. As the project nears completion, we summarise in this paper an analysis of the software design and development.