Abstract

Our project is concerned with how dynamic agencies (sets of collaborating agents that vary their composition and collective behaviour over time) may be used to resolve demanding telecom problems in a flexible manner. Feature interaction (FI) is being studied as an instance of such problems for which dynamic agencies may be an appropriate solution. In our approach, Use Case Maps (UCMs) provide system-wide “behaviour structures” that enable people to get a global understanding of dynamic situations. Feature interactions can be seen visually in the UCMs and then be reasoned about and resolved by people at the UCM level. Tables generated from these behaviour structures provide a framework for humans to add information that will enable executable prototypes to be generated. These executable prototypes are FI-avoidant systems where features are modelled as competing rule engines and interactions are detected and resolved at run time by coordinating through a blackboard. The approach offers the promise of being scalable to practical numbers of features and is being considered for use in future commercial systems.

-- Jean Francois Roy - 17 Oct 2005

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