Software tools and support environment of the national centre for supervision and management of the Italian telephone network

The approach followed for the National Supervision Centre (CSN) is based on the principles of object-oriented software design and the finite state model, which allows the construction of systems by composing a set of modules both logically and physically disjointed. Each module can be referred at the same time as an object implementing a set of operations on its encapsulated data or as one of the concurrent communicating processes of the system. The methodology must be supported by a minimum set of procedures for process organisation and message passing. For this, the CCITT specification and description language was selected. After a brief description of the software quality aspects that must be taken into account, the architecture and most significant functionalities of the CSN system are described. Then the methodology is introduced together with examples of application to a real case