This paper proposes a method of supporting behavioral decision-making with a rule-based system to be used for the design stage of service specifications or service scenarios based on a state transition model. We consider telecommunication services as service scenarios of state transitions. A state transition can be described as a transition rule that is represented as the notation of an IF-THEN rule : "if < condition > then < action >. " Thus, behaviors or service scenarios are assumed to be treated as a set of IF-THEN rules in this paper. In general, an "if < condition > then < action >" rule is called a production rule, and production rules are often used to represent knowledge in expert systems. Thus, rules treated in this paper are a kind of production rule. It is still difficult to decide if behaviors are concurrent, cooperative, or exclusive as a whole system when many service scenarios are combined, even if each rule is clearly described and easy to understand. When several service scenarios are combined, it is necessary for the sub-elements of each state transition to cooperate. The method proposed in this paper consists of the following techniques: (1) decompositions of a state transition to sub-elements, (2) rule descriptions for the decomposed sub-elements and the application of rules, (3) use of conflict and cooperation strategies, and (4) support for behavioral decision-making by showing recommendations for cooperative, exclusive, or concurrent behavior. We provide examples of telecommunication services to show the effectiveness of the proposed method in an easy-to-understand manner. We also show cooperative resolution in the interactions among several services.

Service interaction resolution is an important study subject to realize a network supporting various advanced communication services. This paper proposes service interaction resolution by service node connected with the communication network via the user-network interface. By executing various advanced services on the service node, service interactions can be efficiently resolved without adding new functions to the existing network. In other words, the service node enables a unified execution control of all the services including those for the originating side and those for the terminating side. This prevents the signalling system and the signalling procedure from being expanded to resolve service interactions. Moreover, the interactions between the services initiated at the conversation active state can be resolved by the service node equipped with function of receiving plural types of in-band signals. This avoids functional expansion of the switching systems in the network. In this paper, feasibility of the proposed resolution scheme is proved by showing a structure of the service node and a detailed procedure to resolve interactions on that service node. In the proposed service node, the application part is divided into basic call processing part and service processing part, and the basic call processing part is represented by three kinds of basic call processing state models. The proposed method for resolving service interactions can control services execution with high flexibility by using feature interaction table.

A conflict detection support method for combining additional telecommunication services with existing services is proposed. In this method, telecommunication services are described by the STR (State Transition Rule) method which specifies a set of state transition rules. Though conflict detection in the past depended on manual analysis by the designer, with this method, conflict candidates are mechanically narrowed down and indicated to the designer. All conflicts between five actual telecommunication service descriptions are detected in an experiment using a system developed in line with the proposed method.