Supporting behavioral decision-making for the resolution of the telecommunication service interactions with rule-based system

This paper proposes a method of supporting behavioral decision-making with a rule-based system to be used for the design stage of service specificatio ns or service scenarios based on a state transition model. We consider tele communication services as service scenarios of state transitions. A state t ransition can be described as a transition rule that is represented as the notation of an IF-THEN rule : "if < condition > then < action >." Thus, beh aviors or service scenarios are assumed to be treated as a set of IF-THEN r ules in this paper. In general, an "if < condition > then < action >" rule is called a production rule, and production rules are often used to represe nt knowledge in expert systems. Thus, rules treated in this paper are a kin d of production rule. It is still difficult to decide if behaviors are conc urrent, cooperative, or exclusive as a whole system when many service scena rios are combined, even if each rule is clearly described and easy to under stand. When several service scenarios are combined, it is necessary for the sub-elements of each state transition to cooperate. The method proposed in this paper consists of the following techniques: (1) decompositions of a s tate transition to sub-elements, (2) rule descriptions for the decomposed s ub-elements and the application of rules, (3) use of conflict and cooperati on strategies, and (4) support for behavioral decision-making by showing re commendations for cooperative, exclusive, or concurrent behavior. We provid e examples of telecommunication services to show the effectiveness of the p roposed method in an easy-to-understand manner. We also show cooperative re solution in the interactions among several services.