The DIFFERENCE project facilitates the creation of an integrated service, and management, architecture to support the realisation of a European Open Service Market. This project provides means to ensure that ACTS projects results are more appropriate to industry usage by establishing close links to industry for Special Interest Groups (SIG). The technical approach to bring current industry architecture understanding to ACTS is for project members to participate in and contribute to relevant concertation (domain and chain meetings). The telecommunications business is increasingly using components from industry to achieve cost effective system solutions and this project assists and enhances this trend as it applies to architecturally related ACTS chains. These opportunities will also be used to provide feedback from industry and ensure that experts engaged by the project are vectored to the key project actors This project assists in providing an overall view of the relationships between a number of architectural frameworks and engineering disciplines which will have to be brought together for Trans-European deployment. These common architectural frameworks include distributed system 3-tier frameworks, intelligent network frameworks, service management and service creation frameworks, and Telco management services and computing system management.
Some key results to-date include the following:
established ACTS-Industry liaison group;
snapshot and characterization of selected architectures;
basic framework for Architecture Analysis;
closer industry/ACTS product dialogue via IS&N Industrial Showcase.