Alarm correlation

The authors discuss the development of an alarm correlation model and a corresponding software support system that allow efficient specification of alarm correlation by the domain experts themselves. Emphasis is placed on the end-user orientation of IMPACT, the intelligent management platform for alarm correlation tasks which implements the proposed model. The desire was to lower the barrier between the network management application development process and the end user of the application, the network management personnel. IMPACT is a step towards this goal. The proposed alarm correlation model was used for three purposes: intelligent alarm filtering, alarm generalization and fault diagnosis.<<ETX>>