Challenges & prospects
Automation of service delivery procedures: a systemic approach, beyond configuration scripts

The global and systemic automation of service production and operation processes remains a Holy Grail for operators. The techniques involved are still in their infancy, and raise a number of challenges: the ability to introduce these techniques in a progressive, non-disruptive way within often rigid, sometimes monolithic architectures; the ability to control the volume of signaling traffic characteristic of the decision-making process (resource allocation, dynamic implementation of a set of policies, etc.) to guarantee deployment at scale, while minimizing the risk of a system becoming completely autonomous.The need for feedback mechanisms capable of guaranteeing the determinism of an automated procedure as a function of events of different natures and origins - these are just some of the difficulties that remain unresolved today.

However, academic research and recent initiatives by various...