Using policies in highly configurable component-based NGOSS

Abstract

The mission of operational support systems (OSS) is to run and manage the daily operations of a company. It is very important that the OSS exhibits great flexibility in adjusting its behaviour to ad hoc circumstances and in evolving as dictated by emerging changes. Contemporary advances in the area of software engineering, involving component-based frameworks, service-oriented architectures and Web Services, considerably facilitate the development of flexible component-based OSS. However, unless business rules, constraints and processes are disentangled from the OSS and become separately managed entities, every single change on them would require direct modifications within the system’s software, a fact that still limits the flexibility. It is the primary aim of this paper to examine the role that policies can play in delivering highly adaptable, configurable and flexible component-based new generation OSS (NGOSS). In order to ensure the highest degree of flexibility for NGOSS, the paper makes a threefold contribution. Firstly, a generic high-level model is introduced encompassing constructs that include policies capable of specifying NGOSS components in a technology-neutral way. The model complies with most of the TeleManagement Forum’s NGOSS principles. Secondly, we show how policies can be specified and used to flexibly configure component behaviour. Thirdly, the design of a component container is presented, which provides all necessary tools to facilitate the use of policies and aids the software materialisation of a policy-enabled interface to OSS components. An implementation of the container and an example scenario of its use is then shown.