Abstract: An automation server interfaces with broadcast scheduling systems of various types to automatically synchronize the behavior of interactive applications relative to various broadcast programs, such as television shows and commercials, so as to maintain the appropriate interactive application for whatever broadcast program is airing. This allows for television shows which have an associated interactive application, but which are segmented by commercials (which may have their own interactive applications) to have their interactive application displayed while the television show in on, but not during commercials, while maintaining any state information that has been created during execution of the interactive application. The automation server includes multiple channel interfaces, each having a translator and an event manager. The translator translates native control signals from the scheduling system into a fixed set of atomic commands which represent the lifecycle behavior of a broadcast program.

Abstract: An apparatus is programmed with a plurality of programming instructions for automatically generating a reconfiguration script comprising a plurality of configuration commands for reconfiguring a plurality of telecommunication devices of a telecommunication system, based on a current and a target descriptive image of the telecommunication system. The current descriptive image specifies the devices and their features included in the current configuration of the telecommunication system, whereas the target image specifies the devices and their features to be included in the target configuration of the telecommunication system. The plurality of programming instructions generate the reconfiguration script employing feature dependency graph (FDG) data structures, a device model modeling the rules and behaviors of the telecommunication devices, and feature deletion/addition linklists.