1 An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Network Fault Management

Traditionally, network management activities, such as fault management, have been performed with direct human involvement. However, these activities are becoming more demanding and data intensive, due to the heterogeneous nature and increasing size of networks today. For these reasons, it is becoming necessary to automate network management activities. Artificial intelligence technologies can play an important role in the problem solving and reasoning techniques that are employed in fault management. Expert systems have been successfully applied to some types of fault management. However, these systems are not flexible enough for today’s evolving network needs. We propose a hybrid AI solution that employs both neural networks and case-based reasoning techniques for the fault management of heterogeneous distributed information networks