Extending a communication service provider's operations management based on knowledge granules and aspects derived from imperfect information

Abstract

SummaryThe core of a communication service provider's business revolves around service‐related operations management, usually relying strongly on expert knowledge built inside the company. Knowledge representation in this environment inevitably requires addressing various domains. Team members working on common tasks bring domain diversity to their teams due to their various ontological areas of expertise. All team members must attain an acceptable level of knowledge regarding other domains to reach a team's desired level of effectiveness. This paper provides a novel way of linking divergent domain ontologies to facilitate and enrich service management in the communication service provider environment. The typical service provider infrastructure offers an extensive source of information for deriving knowledge regarding services, but the information is generally imperfect, inconsistent, and incomplete. Introducing a granular approach based on rough sets applicable to this imperfect information enables fractional management, which together with multiaspect formalisms enables the derivation of the specificity of a certain domain from a common source of knowledge without interference from other domains. A case study illustrates the implementation of an intelligent communication service and network management system based on the contexts used for assisting service strategies. The implementation empirically justifies the proposed approach.