ACE: An Expert System for Telephone Cable Maintenance

ACE, a system for Automated Cable Expertise, is a Knowledge-Based Expert System designed to provide troubleshooting reports and management analyses for telephone cable maintenance. Design decisions faced during the construction of ACE were guided by recent successes in expert systems technology, most notably R1/XC0N, the Digital Equipment Corporation VAX configuration program. ACE departs from "standard" expert system architectures in its use of a conventional data base management system as its primary source of information. Its primary sources of knowledge are the users of the database system and primers on maintenance analysis strategies.