Abstract

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. By using standard techniques from description logic reasoning, properties of features can be proved and interactions detected. An EXPTIME upper bound for the complexity of detecting feature interaction as a satisfiability problem is obtained by well known result for expressive description languages. 1 Introduction The term "feature interaction" was originally introduced in the telecommunications domain when new features started being added to the basic telephony service. In [Bowen et al., July 1989], one of the first attempts was made to define the general problem, and to develop a software engineering framework for managing feature interactions. A feature in the context of telephone systems is an addition of functionality to provide new behavior t...

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