Development of IBC service management services

Due to ongoing deregulation and liberalisation in the telecommunications market a dramatic increase in the number of telecommunications services is expected in the near future. The rapid deployment of such services is however hampered by a variety of administrative problems such as e.g. non-existent unified accounting and billing procedures for a one-stop shopping type of service usage. The aim of a unified service management approach is to address such administrative problems and to offer adequate solutions. Interoperability and integration are key to the timely and flexible management and control of telecommunications networks. The paper presents a set of concepts and methods to harmonise the design and implementation of management systems. Results from previous research has been taken into account as a basis for the design architecture. Important work was carried out by the RACE II project, PRISM, which has developed a service management reference configuration (SMRC). This SMRC serves as blueprint for the design and development of IBC service management systems. It defines a set of methods and concepts guiding the analysis, design and implementation of IBC service management services and is structured according to open distributed processing (ODP) concepts. By developing such a design architecture particular focus has been placed on enhancing existing approaches to design management services, for example state-of-the-art object-oriented techniques, and integrating existing standards, for example ODP