Design of the operations system framework for managing telecommunications networks : Methodology and application

Abstract

Operational environments are becoming more complicated and diversified with the evolution of the telecommunications networks, the change of operations and management aspect, and the needs for economic operations and systematic management. A global and unified management process is essentially required in order to meet the advanced operational environments of the telecommunications networks actively and to handle the heterogeneous and complex network elements efficiently. To accomplish these objectives, International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Sectors (ITU-T) recommends the Telecommunications Management Network (TMN) concept and many Public Network Operators (PNOs) have already adopted this concept as an infrastructure of the telecommunications networks operations and management. The objective of this research is to design the Operations System (OS) framework for managing telecommunications networks including the system design and the system requirements. When several types of OS frameworks are under consideration, the telecommunications networks manager should now choose the best alternative for use later in establishing the infrastructure of OSs. The decision-making is done in this research by means of a Multi-Attribute Decision-Making (MADM) analysis. A point to be noted in the present case is that the decision relevant information such as attribute weights and values of alternatives are not known exactly. Rather, these are to be taken in the form of rankings and/or bounds. To deal with such incomplete information, we employ a mathematical programming model based on the MADM approach to choose an optimal OS system design. This approach enables us to check dominance of alternatives and to obtain a set of non-dominated alternatives from evaluating five alternatives in reference to TMN standards. The analysis of KT’s operational environments is performed additionally because the difference between two non-dominated alternatives is not significan...