ENHANCING TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICE ENGINEERING WITH MOBILE AGENT TECHNOLOGY AND FORMAL METHODS

In order to be competitive, telecommunications service providers need new technologies that facilitate the rapid introduction of validated s ervices in a cost-effective manner. Service engineering is a new disci pline in which the telecommunications sector addresses the technologie s and engineering processes required for service creation. Concurrent with these studies, the development of applications in the Internet sh ows a new way to design telecommunications services based on the mobil e agent paradigm. This brings new concepts that fit the requirements o f service engineering. Therefore, merging the approaches enables impro vement of the service creation process. We illustrate this by presenti ng a framework for the formal design of telecommunications services us ing mobile agent technology complemented with formal methods. The cont ribution of this work is twofold. First, it relies on the RM-ODP and s hows how to adapt its concepts to agent orientation. Second, it provid es agent-based service designers with validation and verification tool s to state the quality of their specifications.