Emerging requirements for telecommunication product design and system modeling

The telecommunication market and, with it, telecommunication product design has undergone drastic changes in the past years. As a consequence, modeling and simulation are confronted with new challenges. In this paper we outline some requirement changes for simulation design. We believe that the focus must be on rapidity, robustness, simplicity and intuitiveness and are willing to sacrifice exactness to some extent. We base our statements on the assumption that modeling and simulation ultimately serve to facilitate decision making and that the most important decisions are made in the early design phase. We also stress that managers, who take decisions, prefer robust decisions to optimal decisions for singular cases. That is, they prefer decisions that are valid for a number of imaginable scenarios. Starting from the requirement of rapidity, robustness, simplicity and intuitiveness we suggest a strategy to tackle modeling and simulation: HALDA - heterogeneous abstraction level design approach, where we develop ideas from system test and system integration test and carry them over to the early design phase.