A blackboard system for active decision support in configuring telecommunication services

As a result of the predicted growth in the telecommunications market over the next few years, it is expected that the process of configuring telecommunications services will become much more complex. As a result, the use of advanced information processing techniques to support the people who carry out configuration will become necessary. We describe the design of a prototype system that provides active decision support in such a scenario. The system combines a number of different techniques from operations research and artificial intelligence by use of a blackboard which is specially modified in order to allow the user to actively participate in the decision making process.