A Study on Automation of Network Maintenance in Telecom Carriers for Zero-Touch Operations

In recent years, there are many work efficiency efforts in particular automation of business processes in various industry. The same trend applies to the network operations of telecommunication carriers; however, although automation of service fulfillment, such as developing network services, is progressing, automation of service assurance such as responding to network failure has not progressed. Currently, network maintenance personnel have independently developed tools for automation of network maintenance (such as troubleshooting) process partially and they are manually performing maintenance tasks by coordinating multiple groups of tools. However, in view of the future decrease in the working population, work efficiency must be further improved. Following this situation, this article focuses on further automation of network maintenance process, by developing technologies to orchestrate existing automation tools. In this paper, handling network failures among network maintenance work is targeted, the challenges and the requirements for expansion in the range of automation is discussed, after discussing current automation of network maintenance at telecom carriers in the real world. After that an implementation method that satisfies these requirements using our orchestrator and OSS products is proposed and evaluated. By defining a workflow of network maintenance that makes each process reusable, it becomes easy to create new workflow and update the one, and furthermore it was found that by reviewing how to code the workflow, it was possible to significantly improve processing performance.