Management of Flexible, Personalized Teleservices

Object oriented techniques have proven well suited for handling the complexity of large software systems.We propose an object oriented architecture for telecommuniaction applications, where complex implementations can be build from less complex components. The choice of a particular implementation for a component may be made at runtime from a set of suitable alternatives. Furthermore we introduce the concept of an individual communication environment for each user, where he/she can determine which resources should be available as potential implementations of the telecommunication application components. These componenets may physically belong to a user determined set of hosts or to the network. A model for the management of such flexible services including policies for supportimg the users view of a service as well as the view of the service owner and network administrator is introduced. Management services in this framework accompany a complex distributed teleservice.