Samenvatting

Rapid creation of new services for telecommunications systems is hindered by the feature interaction problem. This is an important issue for development of IN services, not only because of interactions\namong IN services themselves but because of interactions of IN services with switch-based services and potential interactions with services not yet developed. Furthermore, the problem is fundamental to services creation; it is not restricted to IN services. Any platform for telecommunication services requires a method for dealing with the feature interaction problem. A number of approaches for managing feature interactions have been proposed. However, lack of structured ways to categorize feature interactions makes it difficult to determine if a particular approach has addressed some, if not all, classes of interactions. We describe and analyze a number of feature interactions by using two independent classification schemes. This paper is a step to achieving the goal of a coherent industry-wide collection of\nillustrative features and their interactions. The collection will helpconvey the scope of the feature interaction problem. It will also serve as a benchmark for determining the coverage of various approaches, and as a guideline for identifying potential interactions in software architectures and platforms.