Policy-enabled mechanisms for feature interactions: reality, expectations, challenges

Abstract

This paper is based on the discussion during a panel that took place at the 7 th Workshop on Feature Interactions in Telecommunications and Software Systems in Ottawa, Canada, June 2003. It presents a holistic picture on two paradigms, namely feature and policy, and their intertwining. The guest panelists brought examples from complementary areas and presented their experiences on using the concept of policy for defining features and for treating the feature interaction problem. The intrinsic interactions commonly called policy conflicts within policy-based systems were also discussed. The panelists considered methodological issues, such as the use of deontic logic and the representation of features through policies, as well as industrial applications, such as service provisioning and policy-based management applications for service bundling. They also brought out different views that reflect some disparity between the communities involved in this research.

An open architecture for next-generation telecommunication services

“…The problem is exacerbated by boundaries between administrative domains [Cameron et al 1993], despite extensive cooperation and standardization among service providers. This situation has motivated a great deal of research on feature interaction [Bouma and Velthuijsen 1994;Calder and Magill 2000;Cheng and Ohta 1995;Dini et al 1997;Kimbler and Bouma 1998], but its results appear to be too little, too late for the PSTN.…”

New Developments in Ontology-Based Policy Management: Increasing the Practicality and Comprehensiveness of KAoS

“…We believe that the increasingly demanding requirements of new applications (see e.g., [2]) will be difficult to meet without the advantages afforded by semantically-rich representations such as OWL, coupled with practical, usable, and efficient policy management systems that can make use of them. While specialpurpose languages for narrow application deployment may sometimes outperform more general approaches in their particular niche, policy is being increasingly used in ways that cut across traditional domains (as described in section 8 and [2,11]), making a more comprehensive approach to policy management extremely desirable.…”

“…While specialpurpose languages for narrow application deployment may sometimes outperform more general approaches in their particular niche, policy is being increasingly used in ways that cut across traditional domains (as described in section 8 and [2,11]), making a more comprehensive approach to policy management extremely desirable.…”

Handling feature interactions in the language for end system services

“…There are also some existing works on feature interaction in policies [15], and on using logic programming [16][17] to detect feature interactions. These works can handle event-based call processing, which is also the call processing model for LESS and CPL.…”