A summary of the work and achievements of the FlowThru project in 1998.
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More details of the work described below can be found here.
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Objectives
The objective of FlowThru is to demonstrate, through trial implementation, integrated management solutions that resolve telecommunication business problems. These solutions are based on reusable components that support the flow of management information across organisational and technological domains.
The ultimate goal of FlowThru is to provide industry with concrete guidance on how to build optimum solutions to specific management problems from the wide range of architectural and technological approaches currently available from bodies such as the ITU-T, ISO, TM Forum, TINA-C, OMG, ETSI and EURESCOM, among others. In particular, guidance will be given on the design issues needed to create reusable telecommunications management components that may be integrated together from a number of sources to provide operational support system solutions. Such guidance will allow developers of service management systems to make reasoned selections from existing solutions (standardised or otherwise) while ensuring the integrity of the information flows required to satisfy business requirements.
The main objectives of the project are:
The overall strategy of FlowThru is to generate guidelines on management system development and integration technology and to use the development of a set of Trial Business Systems to validate these guidelines and provide a credible base for actively disseminating them and associated results to industrial practitioners and fora. The reporting period has seen the analysis of the state of the art in management system development, the generation of initial Development Methodology Guidelines and the analysis and design of the Trial Business Systems in accordance with the Guidelines. In parallel, excellent progress has been made in liaison with the relevant industrial bodies, principally the TeleManagement (TM) Forum (formerly the NMF) and TINA-C. FlowThru’s integration of existing models and techniques from both these fora under a unifying set of guidelines have made its results highly relevant to both bodies. The following sections provide more detail of the project’s technical approach, its development methodology guidelines, its system modelling activities, its integration technology guidelines and its liaison and dissemination work over the reporting period.
Technical approach
The RACE and ACTS programmes have contained many projects that have addressed issues in telecommunications management. However, many of these have either focussed on specific problem areas such as multimedia service management, inter-domain management, VPN management, ATM management etc, or they have adhered to a specific architecture, e.g., TMN/CMIP or TINA. Though the results from these projects may help industry practitioners faced with problems in these specific areas, there is a lack of general advice on how to approach management problems divorced from specific architectures. FlowThru therefore aims to provide such advice in the form of guidelines targeted at the telecommunication management software sector.
The guidelines will focus on the core problem facing management system developers, and that is how to integrate components from the wide range applicable to management in order to solve specific business problems. These guidelines will provide recommendations on both the methodological approach and the use of different current and emerging technologies suitable for such integration. The principle challenge when making such recommendations to industry, however, is demonstrating their usefulness in order to heighten their acceptance. FlowThru, therefore, has undertaken not just to generate these guidelines, but also to apply and validate them within the project. This is performed by the construction of Trial Business Systems that are developed in accordance to the guidelines and which will be publicly demonstrated in order to provide a credible grounding to the dissemination of the guidelines.
To be credible in their validation of the guidelines, the Trial Business Systems must reflect real business requirements, and must be built from existing management components. In locating business requirements FlowThru has used the TM Forum’s Telecoms Operations Map (see here for details). This is based on a wide-ranging survey of service providers, and models their major operational concerns into a set of business processes. It is the interactions between these business processes that FlowThru has used as the basis for its Trial Business System requirements. The components that are integrated together in the Trial Business Systems originate from previous ACTS projects, principally Prospect, REFORM, VITAL and RETINA. These components are implementations of open interfaces from ITU-T, TM Forum and TINA standards and of specific research results from these projects. The technical approach of FlowThru can therefore be depicted as shown in figure 1.
A major task for the project was therefore to define a trial system that supported the validation and dissemination of the guidelines, but which could be performed within the project’s resource and time-scale constraints. After analysis of the available components and potential dissemination opportunities, it was decided to split the Trial Business Systems into three parts. This enabled the analysis and development of the systems to be individually focussed onto specific business problems, while allowing the project partners to work in smaller groups, avoiding the excessive overhead of a large scale integration activity, as experienced in previous projects. The problems addressed by each of the three Trial Business Systems were taken from each of the three business process areas identified in the TM Forum’s Telecom Operations Map, namely: fulfilment (i.e. service provisioning and configuration management); assurance (i.e. adherence to SLAs, fault and performance management) and accounting (i.e. service and network metering and charging). The specification of the Trial Business Systems is described in more detail here.
Development Methodology Guidelines
The FlowThru Development Methodology Guidelines have been generated in their initial form during the reporting period as a deliverable (D2). This contains a model of the overall business context in which open management systems are developed, which was generated to help in our understanding of the requirements for a suitable development guidelines. The business model for the development of open service management systems centres on a Management System Developer stakeholder operating in a market where it provides management systems (possibly internally) to a Service Provider stakeholder. A management system must support one or more management tasks required by the Service Provider, which may involve interactions between the Service Provider and Customer stakeholders and/or other service providers. Ideally, the development of management systems should make use of commercial off-the-shelf components, purchased from Component Vendor stakeholders in an open market. The System Developer also relies on the use of open standards for platforms and common management functions. These ensure both the interoperability between the provider’s systems and those operated by customers and/or other providers and the interoperability between components purchased from different vendors. The general management system development situation is summarised in figure 2.
The FlowThru development methodology guidelines are aimed at providing guidance to all the stakeholders in this model. It therefore aims to do the following:
The guidelines on the analysis of business process requirements are based on the TM Forums Business Process Model, but also maps this onto TINA-C’s business model in order to better capture complex inter-domain interactions. This mapping between TM Forum Business Processes and TINA Business Roles (see details here) has also formed the starting point of our liaison with these bodies. The Development Guidelines outline how these business modelling concepts can be applied to particular business problems using business role analysis, use cases and UML activity diagrams. The guidelines on presenting management components for reuse makes use of the concepts of a façade, where a component is described not only by its interfaces, but also by a higher level requirements and analysis model, using use cases, UML class, interaction and component diagrams and formal interface definition languages such as CORBA’s IDL or GDMO. In order to enhance the understanding of the development process, a number of worked examples of FlowThru components are presented in the guidelines to illustrate their use.
The FlowThru project is currently using the guidelines to describe and develop their re-usable components. In order to provide a wider audience for feedback and evaluation of the guidelines, FlowThru has been very proactive in disseminating its approach to component based management system development at major international conferences and journals, as well as within the ACTS community. The guidelines have also been presented to TM Forum and TINA technical board representatives and disseminated to working groups.
As part of the FlowThru trial and evaluation work-package, the development process and integration approaches will be evaluated and provide feedback for a refinement of the guidelines. Further details of the development methodology guidelines can be found here.
System Modelling
The project has completed the analysis and high level design of the Trial Business System following the initial Development Methodology Guidelines. This has been initially documented in deliverable D3, though the more detailed design will be completed in year 2. The analysis and design modelling was performed along two paths, one for the complete Trial Business Systems and the other for the constituent components.
Each Trial Business System addresses of the three business process areas identified by the TM Forum’s Telecoms Operations Map, i.e. Fulfilment, Assurance and Billing (the latter called Accounting in FlowThru). For each Trial Business System the following has been identified:
Finally for each Trial Business System a full system model has been developed showing how the components are integrated together in order to satisfy the Trial Business System’s business process requirements. Where necessary additional required sub-systems such as graphical user interfaces have been identified. Summaries of each Trial Business System business model and system model is given in here.
Splitting the FlowThru system into three Trial Business Systems in this way has optimised the amount of parallel work that can be performed in the project as well as allowing different Trial Business System to focus on different problem areas and areas of integration technology. More detail of this split is given here.
Integration Technology Guidelines
The wider IT community in recent years has turned its attentions to address many of the problems that were major obstacles in the development of integrated telecommunications management system. Support for the interoperability of software between distributed computing platforms, and support for the evolution of a market in reusable components have been major problems addressed by the emerging computing platforms such as CORBA, COM and Java. These developments promise to make a wider range of reusable software available to software developers at lower cost. It is vital, therefore, to ensure that these benefits are promptly transferred to the telecommunication management software sector.
FlowThru has identified a range of emerging integration technologies that are viewed as important in the development of integrated management system. Three are outlined below: CORBA-CMIP Gateways to facilitate the integration of IT technologies with existing TMN systems; Component Technology, such as the CORBA Component Model and Java Enterprise Beans for developing loosely coupled reusable software and Workflow Technology for providing a more direct mapping from business process requirements to components interactions. More details are availalbe on the CORBA-CMIP gateway as well as on other relevant technologies, i.e. a standard TMN API and data bases applied to management.
Component Technology
OMG is currently considering the specification of interfaces and mechanisms for a distributed component model. A component model refers to a technology for expressing software entities as reusable components exporting standard interfaces that assist rapid component integration into applications, typically using visual building tools. An OMG "request for proposals" for a CORBA based component model has been issued and the submitted proposals are currently undergoing the OMG adoption process.
FlowThru is applying a CORBA based component model so as to ease the integration of reusable components into the management solutions that will be realised during the FlowThru trial executions and demonstrations.
Specifically, an event-driven component integration approach will be followed in the Fulfilment Trial Business System. The overall integration approach relies on event sources and listeners within the components of the FlowThru fulfilment system while transparent integration relies on the use of event adapters as the "glue" between these components. In an environment where certain event types are agreed, event adapters are not needed, thus reducing the overhead introduced by the additional method-call introduced in the general case. This asynchronous model of communication may not be the best way to go in certain cases where synchronous communication is more effective. However, it provides a general integration paradigm for pre-fabricated components that, typically, support incompatible interfaces.
Management Technology Gateways
History shows that the preferred technologies for implementation of management systems are continuously changing. Going from proprietary solutions, via SNMP and CMIP to CORBA and JAVA, this evolution raises the obvious need for methods easing the integration of management of systems based on different technologies. A gateway between CORBA and CMIP is used in FlowThru to exemplify such a situation, where a CORBA based service management system needs integration with a standard based (ITU X.790) Trouble Ticketing management system (see here for more details).
While a CORBA to CMIP gateway enables the integration of existing CMIP-based TMN elements and applications, it introduces a performance overhead since one additional communication hop is required. A different approach is to retain the managed object part of a CMIP-based application but replace the agent part with a CORBA object that offers a CMIS-like interface. This subsequently means that the Q3 protocol stack is replaced with the CORBA protocols e.g. IIOP. In this way existing investment in managed object implementations is retained and a different migration path to CORBA is provided. An additional advantage of this approach is that GDMO-based models can be implemented over a CORBA platform, retaining CMIS facilities such as scoping and filtering. This is particularly important for applications that require the navigation of complex object relationships e.g. applications that need to administer network topology. The Network Map (ConfM-NM) of the Configuration Management component is implemented exactly in this fashion.
Workflow
FlowThru is using a workflow engine based approach to integrate re-usable components in the Accounting Trial Business System. The reasoning behind this approach is the need for more sophisticated and co-ordinated integration of telecommunications management components that explicitly support telecom operators’ business processes. FlowThru is customising and applying workflow based telecommunication management middleware, which supports the automation of service management processes and the integration of service management components. Applying an engine based workflow management approach is expected to greatly ease the complexity of deploying and integrating management components as well as significantly increasing the flexibility to change management procedures. Unlike traditional systems where telecommunications management components are chained directly together, the workflow engine takes responsibility for the sequencing of the component activations at runtime. Thus management components no longer need to contain semantics of what component or subsystem to invoke next, and re-sequencing of component interactions to support different (evolving) business processes can be achieved with minimum disruption to the components themselves. FlowThru is also identifying how such workflow based management enactment systems can be integrated with existing OSS architectures as well as within emergent telecommunication architectures e.g. TINA