ComCon 7 – Athens-Greece, June 1999, pp. 453 – 462 Flexible Application of Object Oriented Technologies to Distributed Intelligent Networks Menelaos Perdikeas perdikea@telecom.ntua.gr Fotis Chatzipapadopoulos fhatz@telecom.ntua.gr Odysseas Pyrovolakis ody@telecom.ntua.gr Iakovos S. Venieris ivenieri@cc.ece.ntua.gr Telecommunications Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens. Heroon Polytexneiou 9, 157 73, Zographou, Athens, Greece The Intelligent Network Conceptual Model is the reference conceptualization for any IN architecture.. It incorporates all important elements of an intelligent network and identifies their interrelations. More importantly, reifications of these abstract entities are presented from the point of view of four different abstraction layers. Implicit in that structuring is the notion that different layers should be as independent one from another as possible and that different types of concerns should be handled by different layers. We believe that this goal has not yet been realized to a sufficient extend and that the advent of object oriented technologies and in particular distributed object technologies can change that. We present an object oriented architecture that capitalizes heavily on distributed technologies to achieve the above mentioned goal. 1. Introduction The objective of the paper is to evaluate and assess the applicability of Object Oriented Technologies (OOT) and concepts like design patterns, mobile agent technology and distributed processing technologies such as Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) or Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) in the context of a more or less traditional telecommunications domain i.e. Intelligent Networks (IN). While IN are a relatively recent development in the telecom industry, the concepts and precepts inherent in their application are traditional in the sense that they are reflective of the integrated, centralised, monolithic structure of current telecom networks. In utilising OOT in this context there are a lot of problems to be resolved. These problems stem basically from the distributed nature of some of these technologies, which contrast the nearly embedded character of legacy telecommunication software. On the other hand, there is also significant potential to be exploited. We will demonstrate in this paper that the true potential of the IN concept can be more easily exploited by these technologies than it can by legacy, “static” software. This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 gives a short introduction to the Intelligent Network concept and the Intelligent Network Conceptual Model (INCM). Sections 3 provides an overview of some key distributed technologies that are used in the architecture. Section 4 states the problem and outlines what the goals of a