Feature interaction as a satisfiability problem

We present a formal model for the specification of telephone features by means of description logics. Our framework permits the formal definition of the basic telephone system as well as the specification of additional features (call waiting, call forwarding, etc.). Furthermore, by using standard reasoning tasks from description logics, the properties of features can be formally proved and interactions detected. An EXPTIME upper bound for the complexity of detecting feature interaction as a satisfiability problem is provided by exploiting well-known results for expressive description languages.