<p>Copyright TM Forum 2008<br/></p><p><br/></p><p><b>Overview</b><br/></p><p>The Product/Service Rating application calculates the customer specific charges (recurring, one time, usage), discounts, and optionally taxes (when required on charge level, otherwise tax calculation is performed as part of Bill Calculation).<br/></p><p><br/></p><p>The rating application accepts either:<br/></p><p><ul><li>Events / records that have been collected, translated, correlated, assembled, and guided to customer, product and to customer account for usage / content consumption calculation</li><br/></p><p><li>Customer and Order/Product information for recurring and onetime charges.</li><br/></p><p></ul><br/></p><p>Rating applications should be able to process events in a real time or batch mode and must support pre-paid, post-paid and pay-it-now payment options.<br/></p><p><br/></p><p>The rating application must consider various factors such as customer information, product information, price plan and event (e.g. call record, order information, content consumption) details.<br/></p><p><br/></p><p><b>Functionality</b><br/></p><p>The main functions of rating applications are:<br/></p><p><ul><li>Charge calculation of one time and recurring charges</li><br/></p><p><li>Rating of usage events</li><br/></p><p><li>Apply charge level discounts and optionally taxes</li><br/></p><p><li>Support of price plans composed of arbitrary mathematical computation of any Customer / Product / Order and event details</li><br/></p><p><li>Pro rating of recurring charges</li><br/></p><p><li>Rerating - Recalculation of charges based on information received later (e.g. from the Service Level Agreement function, delayed CDR file arrival)</li><br/></p><p><li>Keep flexible accumulators of usage data (e.g. used allowance)</li><br/></p><p><li>Fire notifications upon accumulators reaching a configured threshold (e.g. spending limit support)</li><br/></p><p><li>Advice of charge</li><br/></p><p><li>Provide estimated charge for a usage request (e.g. content)</li><br/></p><p><li>Provide estimated unit of consumption (e.g. time or volume) for given monetary amount (e.g. voice call minutes for $1 balance)</li><br/></p><p><li>Advice of rate - Provide the rate in effect for a usage request (e.g. 0.3Euro per minute for a voice call)</li><br/></p><p></ul><br/></p><p>Non functional requirements:<br/></p><p><ul><li>Throughput - Rating application must support high transaction volume</li><br/></p><p><li>Accuracy - Precision level shall be maintained for small charges</li><br/></p><p><li>Fast new price plan deployment - Quick introduction of new price plan based on new business requirement</li><br/></p><p></ul><br/></p><p>Additional requirements by online charging application:<br/></p><p><ul><li>High availability - Online-Charging application requires high availability of 99.999% application up-time from the rating function</li><br/></p><p><li>Low latency - Responses to requests should be given in very low latency to satisfy Online Charging application</li><br/></p><p></ul><br/></p><p>The online non functional requirements are normally associated with high deployment costs. Hence typical installations of convergent billing applications would include distinct deployments of rating applications for online and offline charging.<br/></p><p><br/></p><p><b>Supported Contracts</b><br/></p><p>To Be Added<br/></p>