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Abstract
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Service interactions are an obstacle to the goal of today's network technologies to introduce new services rapidly, cost efficiently and with high quality. In a contribution to the 1997 Feature Interaction Workshop, Kimbler has presented an approach for handling service interactions in the service life cycle, which introduces the concept of Interaction Filtering, i.e., the reduction of the number of problematic service combinations, as a first step towards interaction detection. In this contribution, a prototypical tool is presented that carries out Interaction Filtering of IN services. It is based on the notion of a call scenario. A call scenario is the association of a number of telephone users that are tied together by one or more services they use in a communication relationship. For each combination of services, a sometimes large list of such call scenarios can result. Such a list is created automatically by the tool described here starting from a simple description of each service consisting of the standard application case of this service (the so-called service scenario), and the triggers and detection points used by this service. The length of this list of scenarios is reduced by topological criteria (conditions for the reachability of service triggers, symmetry relationships) and by other criteria considering the usage of data and resources common to the services. The application of these relatively simple criteria leads to a significant and transparent reduction of the number of interaction prone call scenarios and increases the manageability of the problem's complexity. The list with the reduced number of interaction-prone call scenarios may serve as an input to a further investigation, using, e.g., formal techniques, manual analysis or testing.
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Reference entry
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Keck, D.O.
A Tool for the Identification of Interaction-Prone Call Scenarios
Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Feature Interactions in Telecommunications and Software Systems, Lund, September 1998, pp. 276-290
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