Practical approaches for software components integration in telecommunications

In network engineering as in other areas, sophisticated software tools have been conceived to handle models of increasing complexity. These tools theoretically support a great number of input cases. However, in practice, they are confronted to a limited set of inputs, since too large efforts are required to configure each new input case. Similarly, only a few quantitative metrics are extracted from tool results, whereas the output files could be analyzed in many different ways. The potential of a given tool could thus be decoupled if these preprocessing and post-processing tasks would be wisely automated. In this paper, we focus on these preprocessing and postprocessing operations, and propose a generic execution environment which automates them. This environment permits in particular to assess the influence of various parameters on the final results, and to perform generalized what-if analysis