A method for automatically detecting a control signal configuration of a vehicle component includes making a connection to a channel of the component, performing an electrical measurement on the channel, and identifying a control signal configuration based upon the measurement. Identification and availability information of the shared protection line is distributed among the switches of the SONET rings using K-byte data in the SONET overhead. The invention also provides means for matching words in a database using build around methodology, stem locking methodology, word completion methodology, and n-gram searches.