SIMNETMAN: an expert workstation for designing rule-based network management systems

The authors present SIMNETMAN, a network simulator, and discuss its role in exploring the utility of expert system technology for network management. SIMNETMANs companion system, NETMAN, is a collection of rule-based experts for network management. SIMNETMAN provides the user interface for NETMAN by allowing the experimenter to construct the network to be simulated, to specify the experiments, and also to modify the rules that comprise NETMAN, SIMNETMAN simulates a packet-switched network and actually conducts the experiments requested by the user. An overview of the system is presented, followed by a discussion of the implementation problems. The simulation capabilities of SIMNETMAN and preliminary performance results for the NETMAN/SIMNETMAN system are reported.<>