A growing challenge in the transition of telecommunications provisioning systems from a closed architecture to a distributed open architecture is the need for effective system management tools that encompass not only network management, but also application management functionality. Networking the various provisioning system components resulted in a heterogeneous multivendor environment. At the time, the lack of industry standards in the communications as well as the systems management area gave rise to the development of proprietary communications protocols and network management solutions. This paper concentrates on the analysis of a proprietary total management system (TMS) designed to combine applications and network monitoring in a heterogeneous provisioning system environment. Bellcore's long-term strategic direction is towards implementing the open system interconnection (OSI) management standards model to provide a consistent management environment within provisioning systems. We discuss the transition strategy and an approach to integrating OSI defined CMIP/CMISE management protocols, the TCP/IP defined SNMP protocol and proprietary legacy network management systems to produce an open architecture total management system to complement our open architecture provisioning system strategy. We highlight our main point that neither network management nor application management alone is sufficient. However, the judicious combination of the two yields an unbeatable total management system solution.>

This article presents a description of ARPL—A Retrieval Process Language for hierarchical databases. ARPL is a simple keyword oriented language built around the concept of a retrieval process on a hierarchical database. The retrieval process allows one to delimit a hierarchical database to a subset of the database, apply logical tests on data in the database, and compute the values of complex retrieval functions defined on data stored in the database. ARPL will be seen to be a natural means of expressing the retrieval process in a nonprocedural language.

This paper discusses a set of algorithms which given a univariate polynomial with integer coefficients (with possible multiple zeros) and a positive rational error bound, uses infinite-precision integer arithmetic and Sturm's theorem to compute intervals containing the real zeros of the polynomial and whose lengths are less than the given error bound.The algorithms also provide a simple means of determining the number of real zeros in any interval.Theoretical computing time bounds are developed for the algorithms and some empirical results are reported.