TINA - a distributed approach to service management

The Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture Consortium (TINA -C) was formed 5 years ago to develop an architecture to address the radica l business and technological changes then envisaged in the future telecommu nications world. Central to the proposed solution is an infrastructure know n as the TINA distributed processing environment (DPE). The TINA service ar chitecture, which defines a set of concepts and rules for the management of a wide range of services, is of particular interest here. This paper outli nes the current statics and output of the TINA Consortium and goes on to de scribe a collaborative implementation project which uses many of the TINA c oncepts and specifications to build a pan-European service platform. An imp ortant vision within TINA is that of open interfaces and interoperability i n a heterogeneous environment. The extent to which this goal has been achie ved is discussed in the light of experience.