A high abstraction level approach for detecting feature interactions between telecommunication services

AbstractWhen several telecommunication services are running at the same time, undesirable behaviors may arise, which are commonly called feature interactions. Several methods have been developed for detecting and resolving feature interactions. However, most of these methods are based on detailed models of services, which make them suffer from state space explosion. Moreover, different telecommunication operators cannot cooperate to manage feature interactions by exchanging detailed service models because this violates the confidentiality principle. Our work is a part of the few attempts to develop feature interaction detection methods targeting to avoid or reduce significantly state space explosion. In order to reach this objective, we first develop a so called Cause–Restrict language to model subscribers of telecommunication services at a very high abstraction level. A Cause–Restrict model of a subscriber provides information such as: what is the cause of what, and what restricts (or forbids) what, and specifies coarsely the frequency of each operation “cause” or “restrict” by “always” or “sometimes”. Then, we develop a method that detects feature interactions between telecommunication services modeled in the Cause–Restrict language. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach by modeling several services and detecting several feature interactions between them. New feature interactions have been detected by our approach

Formal Methods for Communication Services

We survey formal methods as they are applied to the development of communication services. We report on industrial and academic projects, consider different communication architectures and work related to the feature interaction problem. Based on our survey, the results reported in the literature and most importantly, on extensive discussions with industry, we investigate important industrial concerns and criticisms about the use of formal methods for the development of communication services. We report on a collaborative project between the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Swisscom, Alcatel and Thomson in which these industrial concerns have been taken into account from the very beginning. The results of this project are currently being integrated into an industrial software development platform