A Constraint-Oriented Service Creation Environment

The challenge of this joint project was to design and implement an environment for the creation of advanced telephone services (Intelligent Network Services) on the basis of a library of basic service components going beyond standard 'clipboard-architectures' with some testing support. The novelty of our approach consists of introducing a declarative speci cation layer, which is used for the construction of the desired services according to global constraints guaranteeing executability and other consistency conditions. These constraints are the basis for an on-line veri cation via model checking during the interactive service design process. Important for the success of the method is the high performance and the availability of diagnostic information in the case of failure: Several hundred constraints must be checked in real-time, and the diagnostic information must re ect the responsible constraint violation as concisely as possible, while preserving as much of the structure of the developed service as possible. The corresponding product was presented by Siemens Nixdorf at the Telecom'95 in Geneva and will reach the market this year. Universitat Passau, Innstr. 33, D-94032 Passau (Germany), tel: +49 851 509.3090, fax: +49 851 509.3092, fsteffen,tiziana,classen,[email protected] . Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, Otto-Hahn-Ring 6, D-81739 Munich (Germany), tel: +49 89 636.42393, fax: +49 89 636.48976, [email protected] .