DECISION-SUPPORT FOR CONFIGURING TELECOMMUNICATION SERVICES

The telecommunications environment of the future will be highly compet itive with service providers competing to sell complex services across a variety of networks. Effective management of these services will be a crucial factor in the success of a service provider. Service manage ment contains tasks that are semi-structured and are best approached t hrough the use of decision support techniques. This paper describes th e motivation for applying decision support systems to service manageme nt and an approach to applying decision support systems to this domain . Active decision support systems are being constructed as a set of to ols with each tool capable of performing a specific service management task. The resulting architecture is intended to allow re-use of decis ion support functionality. Complex and flexible problem-solving strate gies are supported by extending the notion of a blackboard. An example application is described that supports its user in configuring teleco mmunications services.