The current shift from traditional network architec-
tures to software-based solutions is offering new opportunities to
allow network functionality to be managed in a flexible way.
Substantial efforts have been invested in the recent years in
the development of new network management approaches taking
advantage of emerging paradigms such as software-defined net-
working and network function virtualization. Until now however
there has not been much progress in the development of a north-
bound interface (NBI) linking high-level requirements (HLRs)
capturing business objectives to management operations. This is
a crucial functionality to facilitate faster service deployment and
realization of business objectives. In this paper we extend the
efforts towards the development of a NBI and propose a novel
approach for the automatic decomposition of HLRs to network
management operations. We demonstrate its functionality based
on representative use cases and evaluate its feasibility through
prototype implementation. The results obtained show that our
solution can translate new technical requirements to network
configurations in the order of a few seconds, thus enabling
the management of network functionality and services in short
timescales.