Expert Network Management System

"Networking is when you can not get any work done because of the failure of a machine you have never even heard of." -- Annonymous

Researchers

• Project Leader : Dr. Salim Hariri
• Roman Markowski
• Shaleen Saxena
• Vaishali A. Chavan
• Krzysztof Samp
• Yoonhee Kim
• Anil Sharma

Objective

Management of a system is concerned with supervising and controlling the heterogeneous system resources so that the overall system performance and reliability meets the requirements of its applications. This project aims at designing and developing a prototype of network management system based on NetView using Expert system technology. Most current expert systems use production rules and/or frames for knowledge representations. Case-based reasoning(CBR), which uses analogical reasoning methods is particularly applicable to solving problems in large systems, problems such as arise in traffic congestion in large distributed network systems. The advantage of this approach is the ability to use the large-grained knowledge representation of "cases"- the previously used solutions- rather than finer-grained rules, hence potentially enhancing the real-time performace of the systems. The main objectives are as follows.

• Investigate methods for adding values to existing NetView network management system.
• Design and implement expert network management modules and interfaces for NetView.

The Principal Investigator, Dr. Hariri, is a leading researcher on the NYNET ATM Testbed: New York State Information SuperHighway project.

Network Monitoring Tools

Current Environment

• IBM NetView Network Management System
• Clusters of IBM Power PCs running AIX operating system
• Case Center Multimedia Laboratory
• ATM Switches and Testing Devices
• NYNET Testbed

Approach

• Rule Based Expert System
• Case Based Expert System

Ongoing Tasks

Design of the following modules.

• Topology data base To Knowledge Base (T-T-KB) interface
• netmon NetView module to Expert Analyzer (N-EA) interface
• Rule Based Expert Analyzer
• Network Monitoring

Future Tasks

Implementation and testing of following modules.

• T-T-KB interface
• N-EA interface
• Rule Based Expert Analyzer
• Case Based Expert Analyzer module (design also)
• Knowledge Base

Conference Presentations