Flexible approach to service creation environment for frequent IN protocol modifications

NTT has been developing a service creation environment (SCE) to automatically generate service logic programs (SLP) for the advanced intelligent network (IN). The SCE has been applied to the Personal Handy-phone System (PHS) service, IC-card payphone service, and UPT service development. The ability of the IN application protocol (INAP) has been expanded step by step in ITU-T, and the SCE should follow these expansions in ability to provide services requiring complicated procedures in the future. Moreover, NTT has opened the control interfaces for local exchanges to achieve connections with the advanced IN systems of other carriers. We call these interfaces "function menu open interfaces", and are we expanding their abilities based on demands from other carriers. Therefore, functions must frequently be expanded for the SCE. The SLP creation mechanism of our SCE is composed of conversion algorithm and knowledge data. When a function of the SCE is expanded to match the expanded capability of INAP, it is desirable to add conversion knowledge easily. However, the conventional conversion knowledge configuration is very complicated in order to make the conversion algorithm simpler. As a result, only SCE developers who have high skills can expand the conversion knowledge. This paper proposes a very flexible approach which enables SCE developers to expand conversion knowledge easily, by making the logic of the conversion algorithm more enhanced and making the structure of the conversion knowledge data much simpler.