An Autonomous Distributed Expert System for Switched Network Maintenance

TOPAS-ES is an expert system that diagnoses transmission and signaling problems arising on telephone trunks in the AT&T long-distance network. It runs autonomously, issuing operations systems commands to retrieve trouble reports and perform measurements on the problematic trunks. It is also a distributed system, since different copies of TOPAS-ES must communicate with one another in order to coordinate the diagnosis process from both ends of a trunk.