A laboratory for AIN service design and validation

The architecture of a laboratory for design and validation of advanced intelligent network (AIN) services is presented. The system is composed of two main parts: one is a design environment, where design and logical validation take place. The other part is a hardware/software system closely emulating a real IN structure where one can experiment on the service directly. The issues discussed are: a formal and practical approach to validation, covering a range from traditional human inspection to automatic verification of global temporal properties; a logic-programming-based concurrency model to serve as a uniform target for the different languages used to specify network agent behavior; animation of network scenarios; a service logic execution environment designed on the basis of the IN functional architecture defined in CCITT draft recommendation Q1214; and a standard basic call control model (BCSM)-based call control, implemented in the service switching point emulator.<>