MICE: a facility maintenance expert system

The authors describe the metropolitan inter-office carrier expert (MICE), an expert system that pinpoints the cause of chronic digital carrier failures. Since different carrier equipment types are monitored by different operations systems, which are viewed by separate maintenance centers, carrier alarms caused by a single problem appear unrelated and are redundantly pursued. The authors discovered an expert who resolved the cause of failures by manually collecting and analyzing alarms from different operations systems. This alarm collection and analysis is reproduced by MICE. MICE illustrates the importance of system integration, alarm correlation and analysis, and expert systems to the maintenance of today´s networks