Knowledge-based Management and Control of Communications Networks

An environment for creating "expert systems without experts" is being developed for knowledge-based management and control of communications networks. It uses a network simulator in conjunction with a knowledge engineering environment for the experimental development and evaluation of control knowledge. A survivable packet radio network is being used as a demonstration problem, and two levels of network operations have been demonstrated in simulations. One simulation demonstrated knowledge-based network configuration and routing initialization at the "control level," and the other demonstrated network-wide operations at the "traffic level". The traffic-level simulator was also used for speed comparisons of various software and hardware implementations, including IntelliCorp's KEE on a LMI Lambda and a Symbolics 3675, and CACI's SIMSCRIPT on a VAX-11/780, an IBM PC/XT and an IBM AT.