igh level fast test Average time - 20 min Average time - 7 min Normalized costs Normalized costs Labor cost: .29.3 Labor cost: Consumables cost: ..0 Consumables cost: ..5 Capex Capex 99.5% Equip. Card change Activate trigger for equipment Average time - 15 min change Normalized costs Labor cost: Consumables cost: ..5 FIGURE 8.29 Capex A small part of the graph of Figure 8.28 showing associated tags. DSO = Depending on the specific occurence Besides spot processes, carriers implement a great number of recurring processes that periodically happen. In this case the graph does not have a trigger, but it is a closed loop containing a delay to regulate the periodicity of the event. A third type of processes are the continuous processes; these are the activities that never stop and constitute the base of the carrier work. Convergent Network Management and Control Plane In particular circumstances a process can activate other processes starting their trigger. This causes a strong dependence of the operational processes one from the other. Some dependencies however can be neglected since they are SO rare that do not impact the OPEX in a significant way. The analysis proceeds by creating a complete description of the business activity of a big carrier via process diagrams and analyzing how the processes and the corresponding diagrams are changed by the introduction of ASON/GMPLS. Thus operational models of the two carriers are defined before and after ASON/GMPLS. Since we tag every graph branch with a probability and every graph node with a double tag, we can calculate the cost and time needed to carry out the activity. For can every activity we can define an activity cost as the weighted average of the cost of every possible route through the activity graph connecting the activity start with the activity end. The weight of a route is naturally the overall probability that the route will take place. Beside the activity cost, an average activity time is also evaluated, which is sometimes needed to take into account the fact