FORCES Project Introduction

FORCES is the Forum for Creation and Engineering of Telecommunications Services. The project's mission is establish collaborations between UK industrialists and academics to further the science and engineering of service creation and management in telecommunications.

The rationale for the project is to unite UK workers in the field of telecommunications services. A service in the telecommunications sense is a package of network functions that is marketed separately. Service creation deals with the development of network functionality that is directly used by the subscriber. Service management deals with the deployment and maintenance of services. FORCES is building a network of UK workers in this field, acting as a single focus for collaboration. The project is facilitating exchange and exploitation of expertise and techniques.

The main goals of the project are to act as a UK forum on engineering telecommunications services, to bring together UK industrial and academic researchers in this field, to foster discussion of related problems and solutions, and to disseminate know-how so as to improve UK competitiveness. The project is contributing to areas such as intelligent networks, distributed information management, service creation, formal methods, software engineering and info-businesses.

The FORCES project is running from September 1998 to August 2001. It is supported by EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) under grant GR/M00275. Membership of the consortium is free of charge, and is open to UK telecommunications companies, Universities and research centres. Applications to join the project should be made to the project coordinator. Affiliation is subject to approval by the project management committee, but will normally be granted to organisations who are undertaking relevant research or development.

Up one level to FORCES Project