Telecommunications service development: a design methodology and its intelligent support

This paper describes a development life cycle for telecommunications services emphasising requirements capture, formal specification and validation. The service is developed along the three dimensions of the methodology: refinement, completeness and formality, aiming for a complete, consistent and formally specified service definition. The described methodology can be integrated into currently existing development life cycles which employ formal methods for service creation. Active support for the proposed life cycle is provided by a novel expert system called Requirements Assistant for Telecommunications Services (RATS) currently under development. It actively helps during requirements acquisition and early analysis, and encourages specification reuse with the help of a semi-automated negotiation process. The RATS tool advises the service developer during all stages of the service development and on different levels of abstraction, and provides requirements management facilities, like traceability, impact analysis and document generation. Some of the features are illustrated using examples from the Universal Personal Telecommunication (UPT) service.