To enable conflict free scheduling for making changes to elements, related topology data is required to ensure

1. All of the network elements required to accomplish the change are available
2. No outages will be experienced while the changes are being made

Each carrier will necessarily have various ways of modeling their network topology so the API is intended to provide an abstraction of the request and a representation of the topology suitable for conflict avoidance.

For the purposes of conflict avoidance for meeting both objectives above, there are elements which are required to be available (1) and multiple sets of elements of which N must be available (2).

The topology query provides the information that may be used to query the ticket management system which is also carrier specific.