A new approach in feature interaction testing

Feature Interaction (FI) is known as a kind of inconsistent conflicts betwe en new and existing services on the telecommunication networks. In order to detect and eliminate FI, FI testing is needed which checks whether FI occu rs or not for given multiple services. In this paper, we first introduce pr actical examples of FI and then formulate FI testing problem using finite s tate machine. Next, we review the conventional testing methods. Since the c onventional methods generally utilize exhaustive state enumeration for the testing, thus so-called state explosion problem becomes a bottle-neck for t he testing. To avoid this, we propose a new approach by means of P-invarian ts of Petri net. Theoretically, the P-invariants method provides only neces sary condition for FI testing. However, experimental results shows that it essentially works as necessary and sufficient condition for practical servi ces, and that it realizes much more efficient testing than the conventional ones. Therefore, the proposed approach is well applicable to practical FI testing. (C) 1998 Elsevier Sciences B.V. All rights reserved.