FORCES Project Workshop
December 2000

Introduction

The fifth FORCES workshop took place in London, thanks to Marconi Communications as host.

The workshop was intended for consortium members. Other interested parties could contact the project coordinator for an invitation.

Monday 4th December 2000

The following was only for members of the Project Management Committee. The meeting took place in Appleton Room 5 of the IEE, immediately after the colloquium.

TimeTopicChairSecretary
17.15Project Management CommitteeKen Turner, StirlingTBA
18.30Close

Tuesday 5th December 2000

The following topics are open to all project members and invited parties.

TimeTopicSpeaker
09.30Introduction to the dayJohn Derrick
Kent
09.35Policies in an Enterprise SpecificationJohn Derrick
Kent
Specifying policies doesn't occur in splendid isolation, but as part of refining an enterprise specification. The roles, the tasks and the buisness processes of an ODP community provide the basic alphabet over which we write our policies. We illustrate this through eploring a conference programme committee case study.
10.15An Advanced Service Creation Language based on Formal MethodsNeil Mason
Marconi Communications
Intelligent Network (IN) services have been produced by using Service Creation Environments (SCE). With the increasing complexity of telecommunication network configurations and the demand for more imaginative services the task of service creation itself will inevitably become more complex. It is essential to have an SCE that allows the creator to capture the service requirements and produce a deployable service by a reliable process, yet reduces the difficulties presented by these complexities. This talk will propose a language that can be the basis for Advanced SCE. The characteristics necessary for such a language will be developed, and the issue of how to handle concurrency will be covered. Reference will be made to earlier work in formalisable solutions, which is the intellectual inspiration of the new language - ECSP. The application of the innovative features of ECSP to a sample multi-media service will be discussed. This is the result of work carried out at the Oxford University Computing Laboratories, OUCL, sponsored by Marconi Communications Ltd.
11.00Tea/Coffee
11.15Detection and Resolution of Feature Interactions in Telecommunications Systems during Run-timeDave Marples
Telcordia Techologies
Arguments will be presented as to why feature interactions in telecommunications systems will need to be resolved during run-time in the future due to changes in the telecommunications market and the regulatory landscape. These changes are allowing more feature functionality to be deployed into modern communications environments by more independent agencies, such that the first time features may meet is on a real call. With this run-time restriction in mind, a novel approach to the handling of feature interactions is presented which can be used during active call processing. The technique exploits the addition of rollback semantics to traditional features. This allows features to be used in an environment where alternative solutions to feature interactions can be considered by constructing a tree of possible posterior states based on an initial triggering event. The use of a rollback cocoon around existing feature code makes the technique applicable in a legacy environment. Results from the application of the technique, together with reflections on its success and suggestions for further work, will be presented.
12.00Modelling Features and Services: Controlling State-ExplosionMuffy Calder
Glasgow (presented by Peter Saffrey)
Model checking is a very effective and practical reasoning technique for experimental designs of concurrent systems. This should make it extremely well suited to service modelling. However, most models that are reasonably close to operational level suffer from the limitations of state-explosion: it becomes impossible to carry out full verification for more than a very small number of (usually 3) subscribers. Does this matter? And when it does, what can we do about it? In this talk I will explore these questions, and give some answers, outlining a range of standard, not so standard and speculative techniques, in the context of the model-checker SPIN.
12.45Lunch
13.45Preserving Properties through Feature Integration/Using Alternating-Time Temporal Logic to describe FeaturesMark Ryan
Birmingham
Abstract to follow.
14.30Automatic On-Line Resolution of Detected Feature InteractionsStephan Reiff-Marganiec
Glasgow
The talk will present recent achievements and work in progress in the hybrid feature interaction project of the Universities of Glasgow and Stirling. I will concentrate on my own work, which aims to develop automatic resolution mechanisms. Feature interactions are detected at run-time using the transactional feature manager approach of Dave Marples. The methods developed integrate with this approach and thus enhance Marples' solution from detection and manual resolution to automatic resolution. The talk will place the work in context, and then explore what resolutions are available before showing initial ideas for resolution rules that can be used by the algorithms.
15.15Tea/Coffee
15.30Where does FORCES go from here?
16.15Close

Attendance List


Lynne Blair, University of Lancaster
Behzad Bordbar, University of Kent
Graham Clark, Marconi Communications
John Derrick, University of Kent
Adrian Harding, University of Birmingham
Mario Kolberg, University of Stirling
Evan Magill, University of Stirling
Dave Marples, Telcordia Technologies Inc.
Neil Mason, Marconi Communications
Jianxiong Pang, University of Lancaster
Stephan Reiff, University of Glasgow
Mark Ryan, University of Birmingham
Peter Saffrey, University of Glasgow
John Slape, Marconi Communications
Ken Turner, University of Stirling


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