DANTES: An Expert System for Real-Time Network Troubleshooting

Today's computer networks are large and complex. Their dayto-day operation and maintenance can benefit from the support of an expert system, mainly as an aid in troubleshooting. Network troubleshooting has characteristics, like incomplete data, high rate of events, simultaneous presence of several problems, which raise interesting problems in the development of an expert system. DANTES is an expert system designed to provide real-time assistance to network operators. This paper presents the system and stresses the development issues that are peculiar to network troubleshooting. Of particular importance are performance of inference in real-time, multi-problem handling, and consideration of time in reasoning and revision of belief Dealing with such issues and especially with real-time efficiency is primarily a question of system design. This has implications for the knowledge base organization, reasoning mechanism, and recording of deductions.