An automated technique for designing and improving provisioning processes

Network management is an increasingly important area of research dealing with continuously evolving artificial complex systems. We look at the important network management process of provisioning, which involves all activities to implement changes to the network. Typical provisioning activities include addition or deletion of customers and network elements, growth of the network, and load balancing. We present a new method for specifying and analyzing provisioning workflow. Our method is based on representing workflow by finite state machines augmented with the notion of attribute sets. Such a representation allows us to study important properties of the workflow, and analyze it to detect inefficiencies. We also provide an example of the application of this technique to a trunk provisioning workflow