Supporting Service Quality Assurance via Trouble Management

The open service market encourages competition between service providers. To attract and keep customers, service providers require – amongst other things better tools and techniques to increase their competitiveness. In this paper we address one area for tool support: namely, tools for the support of service quality assurance, i.e. so that checks can be made to ensure that services (and the networks they operate over) fulfil the expectations of customers who have subscribed to them. To demonstrate this, we show how trouble management techniques can be applied to develop generic and reusable components. The test-bed for this work is based on a TINA platform Y.TSP that has been extended with a trouble management component. We show how this trouble management component can be used to support service quality assurance via two application cases studies.