A knowledge-based support method for autonomous service operations after disasters

After the 2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tohoku, the importance of network services, like IP phone and e-mail, as a mean of communication in an emergency was hugely increased, but are likely to be discontinued in these situations. If that happens, network administrators have to repair the network and restart the services promptly. It is desirable that novice administrators also take part in network recovery operations, because expert administrators are not always stationed all day long. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-based support method for autonomous service operations in emergency situations. We use the Active Information Resource based Network Management System (AIR-NMS) to reduce the burden on administrators and to enable even novice administrators to operate network services. Finally, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method through experiments using a prototype system.