A KNOWLEDGE-BASED OPERATION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR NETWORK TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT

Abstract

The operation of a telephone network is subject to unexpected contingencies such as facilities impairments, trunk congestion, and focused overload. When contingencies happen in the network, the proper control actions must be taken promptly within a short period of time (e.g. 5 minutes); otherwise, the serious congestion will soon spread to the other parts of network. Until now, there has been a lack of an automated approach to generate a contingency routing plan to prevent network degradation. In this paper, a knowledge-based traffic control support system (TRACOSS) is proposed for network traffic management. TRACOSS not only contains four knowledge bases to accumulate the domain expertise used for contingencies detection, diagnosis, affected traffic estimation and control commands generation, but also contains a multicommodity network flow model to formulate the operation of telephone network. Based on this model, a heuristic algorithm is developed to design the contingency routing plan. TRACOSS has the following advantages: (1) The acceptable contingency plan can be obtained by the heuristic algorithm within the fixed time constraint. (2) Four knowledge bases can be used to accumulate the domain expertise to automate the network traffic management. (3) When new network components are installed, knowledge bases can be easily upgraded to adapt new technologies.