Developing Approaches for Solving a Telecommunications Feature
  Subscription Problem
  Call control features (e.g., call-divert, voice-mail) are primitive options
to which users can subscribe off-line to personalise their service. The
configuration of a feature subscription involves choosing and sequencing
features from a catalogue and is subject to constraints that prevent
undesirable feature interactions at run-time. When the subscription requested
by a user is inconsistent, one problem is to find an optimal relaxation, which
is a generalisation of the feedback vertex set problem on directed graphs, and
thus it is an NP-hard task. We present several constraint programming
formulations of the problem. We also present formulations using partial
weighted maximum Boolean satisfiability and mixed integer linear programming.
We study all these formulations by experimentally comparing them on a variety
of randomly generated instances of the feature subscription problem.
