Meta-tools for Software Language Engineering: A Flexible Collaborative Modeling Language for Efficient Telecommunications Service Design

The increasingly competitive environment pressures telecommunications service providers to reduce their concept-tomarket time. This time is influenced by a multitude of factors. For the benefit of telecom service designers, this paper focuses on increasing the degree of automation, offering team collaboration capabilities and bridging heterogeneous technologies. To address these factors, we propose a model-based meta-tool approach, which rapidly and iteratively generates particular tools for software languages. Each language is specific to one of the viewpoints involved in the definition of a service, as identified in the Intelligent Network Conceptual Model. A flexible language prototype for service designers, that blends a higher degree of formality with creative freedom, has already been implemented. The integration of first collaboration capabilities, defined and tooled, into this language, by including the rationale behind the designers’ decisions, is currently being pursued. A second language prototype, for network designers, together with syntactic and semantic (partial) automatic interoperability between these two viewpoints, are also proposed.