Expert maintenance systems in telecommunications

Automated network troubleshooting knowledge acquisition

“…The power of the heuristic stems from a new effective way to merge information about both component failure rates and test costs. We demonstrate a significant improvement of our new algorithm as compared to the previous approach discussed in [2].…”

“…To evaluate the performance of the heuristic obtained by Algorithm 1 we compare in the Table 1 the numbers of nodes expanded by the Branch and Bound method without heuristic, the A~ algorithm using the heuristic described in [2], and the A~ algorithm using Algorithm 1, where the failure probabilities and the cost of tests (we assume the output of every component to be observable) are summarized in Table 2. …”

“…In Table 3 we compare the performance of the new A* algorithm with the Branch-and-Bound algorithm, and with the previous version of the A* algorithm using the heuristic described in [2], for the parallel network characterized in Table 2. …”

“…MAD is based on using product documentation and experience obtained from craftspeople and field technical support to create the knowledge base for an expert system which diagnoses and chooses corrective actions for DMS-100 problems. The interested reader is referred to [2] for an overview of expert maintenance systems in the area of telecommunications and to [3]---in the electronic equipment area. Early troubleshooting expert systems were unable to optimize the troubleshooting process and to learn new troubleshooting strategies during operation.…”