VALIDATION PROTOCOL - THE MISSING PUZZLE PIECE

Abstract

In multi-vendor T&E systems, a single hardware vendor cannot anticipate the dependencies on the settings from hardware manufactured by other vendors, or the systemic constraints that are specific to a particular customer. The T&E community has recognized the fact that MDL and TMATS XML are not sufficient to addresst his problem alone, and that there is a need for a separate, constraints language. Constraints written in such a language can be validated by a third party validation engine, without relying on any particular vendor’s software. To this end, we developed the concept of TACL, a candidate for the standard constraint language, and demonstrated it with a reference implementation of a TACL engine integrated with the iNET System Manager. In this paper, we argue that this integration should be standardized in the form of a Validation Protocol in order to turn the existing system into a loosely-coupled, standards-based architecture.