An Architectural Foundation for Relating Features

Consideration of services in the Intelligent Network and telecommunications leads to the definition of ANISE (Architectural Notions In Service Engineering). This is a rigorous language for defining services systematically using a hierarchy of constituent features. The basic telephone call is used as an illustrative example, supplemented by a number of variations that show how ANISE can easily cope with changes to the basic call. An indication is given of how this might be used to detect problem areas that may lead to feature interaction.