Service analysis and design with a graphical domain-enhanced tool

Today's telecommunications services are designed as distributed processes. DESPOT, a graphical tool of GTE's intelligent network (IN) Testbed, facilitates the analysis and design of distributed processes by making it easy to create and manipulate component interaction diagrams (CIDs) depicting interactions among process components. DESPOT generates World Wide Web "pages" from domain-specific documentation, so that users can browse and then automatically copy relevant excerpts into CIDs. DESPOT also supports strategic analysis of sets of services, by supplying utilities for statistics, reports, etc. DESPOT has helped GTE portray and analyze the individual and collective impact of over 200 potential IN services.