An application of statistically based temporal reasoning to an expert system performing central office hardware fault diagnosis and isolation

A method for the utilization of statistically based temporal reasoning is examined. An expert system used for the diagnosis of central office telephone switching systems is used as the application environment. Further, a discussion of the different classes of problems that such approaches can effectively address is presented. Problems involving the hardware maintenance of any system may fall within the normal design parameters and expectations for the given system, or may lie outside these parameters; thus, statistical reasoning techniques, such as the one addressed here, which measure aspects of a system´s performance over time, give an indication as to the area to which corrective actions should be applied