PLANNER, the network services planning tool

PLANNER, a network services planning tool, is a prototype expert system that assists in network performance analysis by determining call setup signalling under various conditions specified by the user. The authors provide an overview of PLANNER; describe the project objectives, the knowledge-based methodology and design used, and the implementation of planner; and discuss future applications. Given the user specifications such as the service requested, the network architecture, and the signalling type, PLANNER diagrams the call setup signalling and determines the user-observable and the network call setup times. The underlying model captures the commonalities in call setup signalling across different services and architectures. An outstanding strength of the expert systems technology is the ability to provide a vehicle which makes use of these commonalities in a rapid prototype system