Integrating Requirements & Specifications in the Telecommunications Service Creation Process

Existing telecommunications systems are gradually converging into a ubiquitous information infrastructure inside an open deregulated multi-provider telecommunications market place. Additionally, the demand for new value-generating telecommunications services is increasing and will increase rapidly in the years to come. Therefore, in order to derive a viable service paradigm, a service creation methodology is essential. After a brief presentation of such a proposed methodology, this paper focuses on its service analysis phase. More specifically, it determines the activities that take part in the service analysis phase and the artifacts that are produced, and examines important matters related to the role of use cases and the definition of conceptual models, interaction diagrams, operation contracts and state diagrams in the framework of telecommunications service engineering, exploiting the use of UML. Finally, alternative and complementary approaches for service analysis are highlighted and a validation attempt is briefly outlined.