Are there resource assignments to meet the customer requirements?
One of the most important demands on Service Providers is responsiveness to fulfilling customer needs in the supply of advanced communication services. Service providers face the challenge of providing customers with customised service solutions, competitive pricing, short delivery periods and a high quality of service.
In order to remain competitive the Service Provider must be able to:
In the design of Decision Support Systems (DSSs) it is important to consider which aspects will be performed by the user and which by the DSS.
The GSAC DSS implements support for the user in two areas: Ordering the Decision Process, choices made in one part of a resource assignment will impact upon other parts of a resource assignment; Making sub-decisions, certain sub-tasks of creating a resource assignment are best performed by the GSAC because the computational complexity involved puts the task beyond human capabilities or to achieve efficiency.
The GSAC user is required to perform three roles that are not fully amenable to automation: Qualitative multi-criteria judgements, Coping with impossible requirements and Coping with unforeseen circumstances.
Functionality
The fundamental building block within the GSAC DSS is the tool. Each tool either automates a specific service provisioning task or supports the user in performing such a task. GSAC consists of a number of tools integrated via a blackboard mechanism, together with a control tool named the Task Orderer.
In its software implementation, the blackboard provides structured shared memory for problems and solutions, and provides a simple and flexible mechanism to pass data. Each tool performs a specific task which could progress a problem towards resolution. Tools examine problems on the blackboard and notify a control tool (the Task Orderer in GSAC) if they can contribute. The control tool then decides which tool will work on each problem. Tools can compete with each other (i.e. perform the same task but adopt a different approach to solving it) or co-operate with each other (i.e. work in series to resolve a problem). The user interacts with the individual tools to solve problems.
The blackboard approach has two key advantages for GSAC:
In the use of GSAC, a support tool (called the Topology Generator; see Figure 1) is introduced which maps the technical requirements given, onto a topological model of the network. There are two aspects to GSAC, first the access network and second the transit network. Figure 1 illustrates that clicking on a link (access or transit), the tools that can be applied to that link are shown.
For the access network, the following tools are provided, one for each network type within our scenario: X.25 Access Network Configurator; ISDN Access Network Configurator; MAN Access Network Configurator; Physical Media tool.
Figure 1: The Task Orderer and Topology Generator tools.
For the transit network area two tools are provided for the same task. Each are used in different circumstances: Transit Network Generator; Transit Network Configuration.
Finally, the Database Resource Configurator and IN Service Configurator tools are provided as example support tools for the generation of resource assignments of value added service provider resources.
The tools themselves have been designed to implement a combination of fuzzy set theory, Operations Research, Knowledge Based System, Case-Based Reasoning and Constraint Satisfaction techniques. CLOS, C, and the KnowledgeWorks(1) rule language are the basis for the tools and a concise view of the techniques and technologies is given elsewhere.
Note 1: KnowledgeWorks is a product for building rule based KBS systems in a Common Lisp environment.
