9 Managing Infrastructure Specifications

Use Infrastructure Specifications in Solution Designer to define your locations, inventory groups, involvement, and role.

Topics in this Document

About Infrastructure Specifications

You use Infrastructure Specifications application to define the locations, Inventory Groups, Involvements and Roles:

About Locations

Locations define geographic references that are relevant to services or resources. Locations can be specific places, such as a residence or a business, or more general places, such as a city.

In Solution Designer, two location specification types are supported:

  • Place Specifications: You use Place specifications to define entities that represent places that can be located on maps.

  • Property Location: You use Property Location specification for geographic locations involved in connectivity scenarios. Unlike Place entities, Property Location entities are all based on a single specification.

In Solution Designer, two locations Customer Site and Property Location are pre-loaded and can be used in the PSR models. Customer Site location is a Place Specifications with the place type as Address. For example, in a Fixed line service, a Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) that is, a telephone instrument must be installed at that customer location. Use Customer Site in the PSR model to represent the customer location where the CPE must be installed.

Use Property Location in the PSR model to represent the location where the service originates or is delivered. For example, in a Carrier Ethernet service, the service is delivered to one or more service locations by a service provider.

About Place Specifications

You use Place specifications to define geographic entities that can be located on a map, such as a state, city, street, postal address, campus, or building. Place entities answer the business question of where other inventory entities (such as subscribers, services, equipment, service terminations, and so on) are located.

Table 9-1 shows the four different types of Place specification that describe different geographical entities.

Table 9-1 Types of Place Specification

Place Type Description

Site

Defines a loosely defined place such as a campus, cell site, or VPN site. Unlike a location, a site is not necessarily bound to specific geographic coordinates.

Address

Defines a place using the standard address format to meet your business requirements and national postal standards.

Address Range

Defines a group of addresses as a range, such as an address defined with a low street number and high street number.

Location

Defines a place based on geographic references. It can be a very specific place, such as a residence, or more general places, such as a city or province.

You can geocode a location to identify its placement on the face of the earth and to enable geographic visualizations of your network or business. Using geographic coordinates also makes it possible to calculate distances between locations.
About Property Location Specifications

Property Location entities define where resources are located and where connectivity is terminated. Property Location entities are optimized for defining the locations of devices and services in your network. Property Location entities are all based on a single specification. Property Location is pre-loaded in Solution Designer. You can supplement the default data elements of Property Location entities by adding Characteristics. The added characteristics apply to all the instances of the entity in the run-time environment. To add more characteristics to Property Location, revise the preloaded Property Location Extension specification. See "Revising Infrastructure Specifications" for information on revising locations.

About Inventory Group Specifications

You use Inventory Group specifications to organize and correlate entities in the inventory. You can define inventory groups to organize entities based on certain criteria such as geographic area, serving area, billing area, IP address pool, and so forth. For example, an inventory group containing locations and telephone numbers enables you to specify the telephone numbers that can be selected from a specific serving area. You create Inventory Group specifications in the same manner as you create other types of specifications. See unresolvable-reference.html#GUID-F15C6B9F-0298-40E6-853F-BA66B7C6AB87 for creating Inventory Group specifications.

Enhanced Product Fulfillment Capabilities

This section includes information about new features introduced to enhance the product fulfillment capabilities.

Key capabilities include:
  • Importing capabilities cartridge manifests to expose fulfillment patterns, systems, and functions within SCD.
  • Creating and managing product fulfillment models, including configuration of decomposition rules such as routing policies and granularities.
  • Mapping product specifications to customer-facing services (CFS) and fulfillment patterns.
  • Managing the full initiative lifecycle with streamlined publishing and workspace management.
  • Supporting model validation, finalization, and automated publishing of complete solutions.
  • Enabling comprehensive operational management for designed solutions within SCD.
These enhancements deliver end-to-end design time support for modeling, validating, and managing complex service fulfillment solutions.
The key enhancements are:

About Role Specifications

You create Role specifications to define the functions played by entities in an inventory. For example, an instance of a Party specification called Individual could have the role of subscriber or employee.

An entity can play multiple roles simultaneously and its roles can change over time. When a role specification is created, you must select one or more role-enabled entity types to which the role applies. When an instance of the selected entity type is created in UIM, the role may be optionally applied to the entity. For example the role of MPLS can be applied to a Logical Device and a Pipe, indicating that they both support MPLS technology.

An entity's role might be relevant to its involvements with other entities. Not all entity types can be assigned roles. In UIM, role-enabled entities have Role areas on their Summary pages.

When you create a Role specification, you can optionally select a role type. The following are the role types:

  • Technology: This role defines the technology that an entity operates under or supports.

  • Function: This role defines the function that an entity plays.

  • Topology: This role defines the role the topology plays in the network topology, such as hub or spoke

  • Target: This role identifies the entity as a target for activation systems. A network target is a resource on which services or other resources must be activated. For example, in a Mobile Service example, a voice mail service must be activated on a voice mail server. In this scenario, the voice mail server is the target for the voice mail account.

    In Solution Designer, you can create Role specifications with the Target role type. In UIM, Role entities that were created using the specifications with Target role type can be associated to logical devices and parties to identify them as network targets.

    When you assign a Target role to a Logical Device or Party entity, it becomes a target for other entities associated with it in various ways. Logical devices are network targets for:

    • Logical device accounts associated with them

    • Logical devices in their hierarchies (unless those logical devices are themselves network targets)

    • Device interfaces in their hierarchies

    • Any entities with which they have custom involvements based on the Manages (Oracle Provided) base specification

    Parties can be network targets for:

    • Any entities associated with them

    • Any entities with which they have custom involvements based on the Manages (Oracle Provided) base specification

Creating Infrastructure Specifications

You can create the following Infrastructure Specifications:

Note:

Two locations Customer Site and Service Location are pre-loaded in Solution Designer.

Commercial Domain Management

Product Specialists can now create, update, search, and delete Commercial Domains. The key features include flexible association with fulfillment models and product specifications, advanced search and filtering, and safe deletion controls for improved domain management. See "Managing Domains" in Solution Designer User's Guide for more information on managing commercial domains.

Creating Involvement Specifications

Use Involvement Specification to define associations between entities for relationships that are not currently supported in UIM.

To create Involvement Specifications:

  1. In the Solution Designer landing page, click the Infrastructure Specification application.

  2. Click Create Infrastructure Specification in the Infrastructure Specification application.

  3. Click Involvement Specification in the Create Infrastructure Specification pop-up.

    The Create Involvement Specification page opens.

  4. Enter the following fields:

    Table 9-2 Create Inventory Group Fields

    Field Name Required or Optional Description
    Name Required Unique name of an Involvement Specification.
    ID Required Unique Id of an Involvement Specification.
    Initiative Required The initiative that an Involvement Specification belongs to.
    Start Date Optional The starting date of an Involvement Specification.
    End Date Optional The ending date of an Involvement Specification.
    Description Optional The description of an Involvement Specification.

  5. Click Create and Continue.

    The Involvement Specification editor page opens.

  6. You see the following tabs:

    • General Information: Displays the general information of the Involvement Specification.

    • Used by: Lists all the specifications that are related to the Involvement Specification.

Creating Locations

You can create the location in Solution Designer. Two locations Customer Site and Service Location are pre-loaded in Solution Designer and can be used in PSR Models.

To create locations using the Infrastructure Specifications application, do the following:

  1. Click Create Infrastructure Specification in the Infrastructure Specification application.

  2. Click Place Specification in the Create Infrastructure Specification pop-up.

    The Create Place Specification page opens.

  3. Enter the following fields:

    Table 9-3 New Place Fields

    Field Name Required or Optional Description
    Name Required Unique name of the place entity.
    ID Required Unique Id of the place entity.
    Initiative Required The initiative that the location belongs to. This location is available only for the selected initiative across the application until the initiative is released.
    Type Required The types of place specification.
    • Site defines a place that does not have a single, precise location.
    • Address defines ways to locate places based on textual information.
    • Address Range define a place using groups of related addresses.
    • Location defines a place based on geographic references.

    Assign to Multiple Entities

    Optional

    Select the check box if the instances of the specification can be assigned to more than one instance of a parent related entity at the same time.

    Allow Multiple Assignments

    Optional

    Select the check box if instances of this specification can assign entities whose specifications have Assign to Multiple Entities selected.

    Start Date Optional The starting date of the place.
    End Date Optional The ending date of the place.

    ID Generation

    Optional

    Select Manually or ID specification to specify the method in which the resource ID must be generated at the run time environment. This field is not available for Network Address Domain and Other specifications.

    ID Specification

    Optional

    		 Select the Identifier specification that must be used to generate resource IDs at runtime. This field is active only when you choose ID Specifications as the ID Generation method.
    Description Optional The description of a place.

    Note:

    The location must have a unique name and ID.

  4. Click Create and Continue.

    The Place editor page opens.

  5. You use the following tabs to define characteristics on locations:

    • General Information: Displays the general information of the location.

    • Configuration: Configure the relationship between the place specification and the resource entities. This tab is available only for Site type place specification. This builds a hierarchy between site and resources. See "Configuring Relationships between Specifications" for details on how to configure the relationships between specifications.

    • Characteristics: Defines the characteristics for the locations along with the hard attributes that are added by default. You can use the existing data elements or create a new data element. Data elements are added as characteristics to realize them in UIM. See "Defining Characteristics" on how to define entity characteristics.

    • Related Specifications: Relate a specification to the selected place specifications. The Related Specifications tab is available only for Inventory Groups specification and Place specifications. See "unresolvable-reference.html#GUID-3BF4A3FD-C993-408C-A77A-1CD08950C0CB" for details on defining related specifications.

    • Used by: Lists all the PSR Models and specifications that use the location.

  6. Click Back at the top left, to return to the Infrastructure Specifications page.

Creating Role Specifications

Use Role Specification to define associations between entities for relationships that are not currently supported in UIM.

To create Role Specifications:

  1. In the Solution Designer landing page, click the Infrastructure Specification application.

  2. Click Create Infrastructure Specification in the Infrastructure Specification application.

  3. Click Role Specification in the Create Infrastructure Specification pop-up.

    The Create Role Specification page opens.

  4. Enter the following fields:

    Table 9-4 Create Role Fields

    Field Name Required or Optional Description
    Name Required Unique name of the Role Specification.
    ID Required Unique Id of the Role Specification.
    Initiative Required The initiative that the Role Specification belongs to.
    Role Type Optional The type of the Role Specification. The available role types are Technology, Function, Topology, or Target. See "About Role Specifications" for the supported role types.
    Applicable Entities Optional The entities that the role specification is applicable to. The role specification is available to all the entities by default in UIM run-time. If you select specific entities in Applicable Entities, the role specification is available only to those selected entities at UIM run-time.
    Start Date Optional The starting date of the Role Specification.
    End Date Optional The ending date of the Role Specification.
    Description Optional The description of Role Specification.

  5. Click Create and Continue.

    The Role Specification editor page opens.

  6. You see the following tabs:

    • General Information: Displays the general information of the Role Specification.

    • Used by: Lists all the specifications that are related to the Role Specification.

Viewing Infrastructure Specifications

You can view the specifications from the Infrastructure Specifications application or from the Initiative Items tab in the Initiatives application.

To view the Infrastructure specifications:

  1. In the Solution Designer landing page, click the application that you want to work with.

  2. Do one of the following:

    • In the Infrastructure Specifications application, search for a specification using the following criteria:

      • Specification name
      • Status
      • Initiatives
      • Type
      • Last Updated

      The Infrastructure specification result is filtered based on the search criteria.

    • In the Initiatives application, search for an initiative and click the Initiative Items tab in the initiative editor page.

  3. Select an Infrastructure specification to view the details.

    The Infrastructure specification editor page opens.

  4. You can view the Infrastructure specification details such as General Information, Characteristics, and Used by for the respective specifications in different tabs.

  5. Click Back on the top left to return to the Infrastructure Specifications page or the Initiatives Items tab in the initiatives editor page.

Updating Infrastructure Specifications

You can update the general information for Infrastructure Specifications.

Note:

You can update a Infrastructure specification only if the associated initiative is in Definition and Advanced Configuration status.
To update a specification:

  1. In the Solution Designer landing page, click the application that you want to work with.

  2. Do one of the following:

    • In the Infrastructure Specifications application, search for a specification and open the specification.

    • In the Initiatives application, search for an initiative and click the Initiative Items tab in the initiatives editor page. Select a specification to update the details.

    The specifications editor page opens.

  3. You can update the general information for the respective specifications.

    • General Information: View or update the general information for the selected specification.

    • Characteristics: View or update the characteristics for the specifications. See "Defining Characteristics" for details on defining entity characteristics.

    • Used by: Lists all the PSR Models and specifications that use the selected specification. Click the entity name to the view the general information of the entity.

  4. Click Back on the top left to return to the Infrastructure Specifications page or the Initiatives Items tab in the initiatives editor page.

Support for Importing and Exporting Product Fulfillment Model

You can now import and export product fulfillment models. Import models from other environments, or download and import sample PSR models from Oracle Software Delivery Cloud. Export a model from your test environment and import it into your production environment. Models are downloaded as JSON files. For more information, see "Importing PSR Models" and "Exporting PSR Models" in Solution Designer User's Guide.

Revising Infrastructure Specifications

You can revise an infrastructure specification in the Released status. See "About Revising Entities" for information on revising an entity.

To revise an infrastructure specification:

  1. In the Solution Designer landing page, click the application that you want to work with.

  2. Do one of the following:

    • In the Infrastructure Specifications application, search a specification.

      The specification is listed in the results section.

    • In the Infrastructure Specifications application, search and open a specification.

    • In the Initiatives application, search for an initiative and click the Initiative Items tab in the initiatives editor page. Select a specification.

      The specification editor page opens.

  3. Click Revise.

    The Revise Specification dialog box opens. Specification includes Location, Inventory Group, Role, Involvement specifications.

  4. Select an initiative that is in the Definition status and click Continue.

    The corresponding specification editor page opens.

  5. The configuration and general information can be modified for the revised specification.

Deleting Infrastructure Specifications

You can delete a specification from the Specifications application or from the Initiative Items tab in the initiatives editor page in the Initiatives application.

To delete an Infrastructure specification:

  1. In the Solution Designer landing page, click the application that you want to work with.

  2. Do one of the following:

    • In the Infrastructure Specifications application, search for a specification.

      The specification is listed in the results section.

    • In the Infrastructure Specifications application, search for and open a specification.

      The specification editor page opens.

    • In the Initiatives application, search for an initiative and click the Initiative Items tab in the initiatives editor page. Open a specification.

      The specification editor page opens.

  3. Click Delete.

    A confirmation dialog box appears.

  4. Click Delete in the confirmation dialog box.

    The specification is deleted if it is not associated with any other specifications or PSR models. If you are deleting a revised specification, only the current revision is deleted and the specification reverts to the previously released version.

Note:

You can't delete an Infrastructure specification after you complete the Advanced Configuration phase of the associated initiative.