Customer service provisioning in intelligent networks

The author points out that despite the convenience of using functional components (FCs) as service building blocks, service provisioning in the intelligent network (IN) still presents major problems. He focuses on issues of responsiveness to customers. When customers are allowed to provision new IN services, it is necessary to consider whether the set of FCs can be directly used by customers without cause problems and whether the set of FCs of flexible enough to construct the services customers are likely to want. The author investigates customer service provisioning problems and flexibility in using the IN FCs, and proposes methods to support integrity control for service development. For concreteness, he focuses on the set of FCs defined in Bellcores´s IN/1+ network.<>