Avoiding Feature Interactions in the Users' Interface

The causes for feature interactions are many, therefore several remedies will have to be applied together. In this paper, we investigate the architecture of the users' interface of a telephone switching system and tackle a certain kind of feature interactions by employing a more modular structure for the design of the system and its features. We propose to apply results from the research on human-computer interfaces (HCI) to the speciication of requirements of telecommunication systems. After we have connned the feature interactions in question to one information-hiding module, we show what is necessary to detect them by formal validation. We discuss brieey how the general approach can be applied to the existing Intelligent Network (IN) architecture in particular.