books

Expert Systems Applications in Integrated Network Management

E C Ericson, L Ericson and D Minoli (Eds)

Artech House, UK (1989) £55, ISBN 0890063850, 369pp

Distributed data processing systems are now reasonably commonplace. As the networks they depend on grow in size, the task of network management becomes increasingly important and complex. Network management is, however, an area ripe for automation and expert sys- tems are seen as one way to achieve this in many of the management areas. This text sets out to review the adoption of expert systems in the network management field and survey existing tools and research. It both follows and promotes the ISO-OSI management framework in doing so.

There are eight chapters in the book and the bulk of the content comprises a set of reproduced re- search and review papers from va- rious prestigious journals and con- ference proceedings e.g. ACM, IEEE and AT&T journals and pro- ceedings.

The first chapter provides a general introduction to expert sys- tems. Topics covered include the expert system environment, heuris- tic inference techniques, expert sys- tems, AI product categories, knowledge-based systems for com- munications, cost of the technolo- gy, AI market growth projections,

and a critical view of, and trends in, AI. All this is discussed in 63 pages, backed up by 91 references.

The second chapter begins with an introduction to the ISO-OSI management framework, followed by an examination of rule bases and expert systems applied to network management.

Chapters 3-7 form the 'middle' of the book. In these chapters, papers are grouped by network management functions covering configuration management, fault management, accounting manage- ment, and security management (the chosen groupings being those suggested by the ISO-OSI manage- ment framework).

The final chapter provides a dis- cussion on network administration, logistics and planning tools.

Each of the chapters 2-8 has a short pretext reviewing the papers that make up that chapter and providing some 'glue' between the individual chapters, rather than just presenting a set of papers. The majority of papers are dated 1988 so the book is fairly up-to-date. A useful addition would have been, at the end of each chapter, a summary of the main points the selected papers highlighted. Also, a ninth

chapter of conclusions might have been a good idea, as would an index.

Some discussion trying to rationalize exactly where network management responsibility lies would have been interesting. Is it just to do with layering tools and systems on top of existing operating systems, or is it to do with building the necessary functionality into operating systems and networking software to make it an internal part of their function?

The title of the book talks of 'integrated network management' without committing itself to what that really is. A clear-cut discussion of 'integrated' would have been provocative.

At £55 softback, this is a special- ized text whose primary audience is presumably researchers in the field. Also, lecturers of networking cer- tainly ought to be able to squeeze a good few lectures from it. How- ever, the production quality of the review copy was appalling with a number of diagrams unreadable (the result of photocopying what were previously colour diagrams) and a few not even pasted-in hori- zontally. Consequently, the book is overpriced.

Finally, it is worth mentioning (for a UK audience) that while the book follows the ISO-OSI framework in its discussion, it is a US textbook and most of the pre- sented papers are US in origin. The feel of the book is very much that it is a set of conference proceedings but most papers provide some use- ful material.

Dr David Coffield Oracle UK

Edinburgh, Scotland

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124 Knowledge-Based Systems