ServiceNet: An Agent-Based Framework for One-Stop E-Government Services

One-stop provision of Web-based services is a major goal of e-government. Often service delivery requires several steps cutting across multiple departments or agencies, each with separate eligibility and other rules, data requirements, and processes. For this complex setting, we develop a tiered, intelligent-agent-based framework called ServiceNet. The layers include client problem diagnosis, service planning, and service provision. The central contribution of our framework are corresponding client problem diagnostic, client advocate, and service facilitator agents. We define a service plan to be the steps that a citizen client can take to meet a need. Each service has 1) a rule base of entry requirements, including predecessor and successors steps, that must be satisfied before a client can register for the service; 2) one or more processes; 3) associated database record sets; and 4) a facilitator agent, which provides information on meeting eligibility rules, finding service capacity, scheduling, etc. The client advocate communicates with service facilitator agents to build, execute, monitor, and report on service plans.