Rule-Based classification for a case-based system

We introduce an architecture for combining rule-based and case-based reasoning in the field of telecommunication network alarm handling. With this approach it is possible to handle alarms from different generations of network equipment or from equipment of different vendors. The architecture consists of: 1) Rule-Based reasoning (RBR) for the pre-processing of alarms and messages, 2) Case-Based reasoning (CBR) to find previous failure cases among the pre-processed alarms and messages and 3) fault diagnosis which is based on these two earlier parts. The alarms and messages are classified into basic classes during the pre-processing phase, in order to avoid dependency on equipment generations and vendors. The CBR part finds new failure cases among incoming alarms and messages based on certain rules.