An automated fault diagnosis system using hierarchical reasoning and alarm correlation

A slight fault may even cause critical disruptions or remediless damages to the network while a network manager is lost in a large number of alarms. Therefore, the development of a practical and effective system for network fault diagnosis becomes an urgent job. We develop a hierarchical domain-oriented reasoning mechanism suitable for the delegated management architecture. It is based on the causality graph of the sensibly-reduced network fault propagation model from the result of our empirical study. An automated fault diagnosis system called ACView (Alarm Correlation View) for isolating network faults in a multidomain environment is proposed according to the hierarchical reasoning mechanism. This diagnosis system provides not only the process of automated alarm collection and correlation, but also the function of efficient fault localization and identification.