Managing OAM&P requirement conflicts

Specifying consistent services at early project stages is a telecommunication service engineering challenge. Service logic inconsistencies, also known as feature interactions (FIs), can affect various types of services ranging from signaling protocol features to value-added end user services. This problem has been investigated for all those types of services. However, inconsistencies of Operation, Administration, Management and Provisioning (OAM&P) services have not been sufficiently addressed. The present paper studies the detection of OAM&P service inconsistencies at the software requirement specification stage. The aim is at the resolution of the problem before reaching the implementation step. The basic idea of the here reported approach is to consider service inconsistencies as software requirement conflicts. The contribution of the present paper consists of an OAM&P requirement modeling language and a requirement conflict detection method. A validation with a case study is reported.