An object-oriented expert system for local area network design

Computer networks are an essential tool for people in business, industries, government, and schools. With the rapid rate of change in network technology and product, and the emergence of highly sophisticated network users, network design has become an increasingly complex task. Although the computer society aims at agreeing to a series of international standards for describing network architectures, the design of a computer network remains to be an ill-structured problem that lends itself perfectly to expert systems solutions. We propose an expert system that is able to design local area networks meeting the requirements specified by the user. Rules and guidelines pertaining to local area network design are formulated and incorporated into the knowledge base. The system is built on an object-oriented paradigm. The object-oriented approach and the hierarchical rule structure paradigm are discussed. We also employ a blackboard approach by which dynamic objects can communicate with rules easily