Abstract

In order to cope with the expected requirements of the telecommunications market of the near future, increasing efforts have been made to address issues like reduction in time to market and developing costs. These goals are being targeted by developing new service architectures and new service creation approaches.

Despite several warnings, one essential aspect is often neglected - the potential problems arising when services interwork, the well known service interaction phenomenon. Indeed, in a deregulated market this is regarded to be an even more pressing issue as services of different providers from a multitude of service creators are likely to interwork. This in turn leads to the fact that the ad-hoc approaches to service interaction handling commonly applied in the industry today will not be sufficient anymore.

Here it is argued that what is needed is an overall comprehensive approach to service interaction management which recognises the changed market situation. Together with an overall service creation approach, the ACTS TOSCA project has developed a comprehensive service interaction management approach which is embedded in a business model. This approach, presented here, has been developed under special consideration of the needs of the future telecommunication market.