Verification of intelligent network services by analyzing feature interactions using a petri net model

Abstract

The notion of a Service Creation Environment (SCE) has emerged as a feasible solution to rapid deployment of the Intelligent Network services. Nevertheless, the SCE still requires much enhancements to be used for rapid and reliable service creation in practice. The Intelligent Network service as a distributed service logic working in real-time is complex to design and manage. The major difficulties with service creation are associated with automatic translation of a service specification and verification of a generated service including feature interactions. It is noted that a more general and user-oriented interface, formalization of specification considering concurrency and distribution aspects of services and platforms, and an integrated specification and analysis processes are desired for the service creation and verification. We propose a new approach for the service creation and detection of feature interactions considering both global and distributed characteristics of the Intelligent Network services. Our service creation approach is based on a parallel composition and synchronization of the Intelligent Network services in the component based service logic to support the incremental service specification. Some new important mechanisms and activities, such as a formalization of service specification and description, an automatic translation mechanism, and a composition method of Service Independent building Blocks using component-based transformations are provided. We also propose a service verification method for detecting feature interactions, which transforms components of services into Constraints-based Modular Petri-nets and provides a method of analyzing feature interactions by using Petri net slices and property nets.