Customer-engineer relationship management for converged ICT service companies

Thanks to the advent of converged communications services (often referred to as ‘triple play’), the next generation Service Engineer will need radically different skills, processes and tools from today’s counterpart. Why? in order to meet the challenges of installing and maintaining services based on multi-vendor software and hardware components in an IP-based network environment. The converged services environment is likely to be ‘smart’ and support flexible and dynamic interoperability between appliances and computing devices. These radical changes in the working environment will inevitably force managers to rethink the role of Service Engineers in relation to customer relationship management. This paper aims to identify requirements for an information system to support converged communications service engineers with regard to customer-engineer relationship management. Furthermore, an architecture for such a system is proposed and how it meets these requirements is discussed

Wide-area Incident Management System on the Internet

The incident management process consists of four sequential steps-incident detection, response, clearance and recovery. Each of these components comprises of a number of operations and coordinated decision-making between the agencies involved. The provision of computer based support tools for the personnel involved will help develop appropriate strategies and increase efficiency and expediency. Existing systems are developed on various traditional computing platforms. However, with the advent of World Wide Web and Internet based programming tools such as Java, it is now possible to develop platform independent decision support tools for the incident management agencies. Any agency will be able to use these Web based tools on a computer with a Java enabled browser. Thus, Web based tools offer an invaluable opportunity to develop next generation online decision support tools for real-time traffic management. The major objectives of this paper are: 1. to explore and demonstrate the applicability of Web-based tools for the development of online decision support systems for incident management and, 2. to develop and test a prototype incident management decision support system (DSS) which has most of the capabilities of similar UNIX based DSS. The paper briefly describes the implementation and development of a prototype wide-area incident management support system using Web-based tools. It also describes the implementation architecture and the individual functions of this prototype

Integrated Network Management of Hybrid Networks

We describe our collaborative efforts towards the design and implementation of a next generation integrated network management system for hybrid networks (INMS/HN). We describe the overall software architecture of the system at its current stage of development. This network management system is specifically designed to address issues relevant for complex heterogeneous networks consisting of seamlessly interoperable terrestrial and satellite networks. Network management systems are a key element for interoperability in such networks. We describe the integration of configuration management and performance management. The next step in this integration is fault management. In particular we describe the object model, issues of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), browsing tools and performance data graphical widget displays, management information database (MIB) organization issues. Several components of the system are being commercialized by Hughes Network Systems. A revised version of this report has been published in Proceedings of the 1st Conference of Commercial Development of Space, Part One, pp. 345-350, Albuquerque, New Mexico, January 7-11, 1996.</ul

Hybrid Network Management

We describe our collaborative efforts towards the design and implementation of a next generation integrated network management system for hybrid network (INMS/HN). We describe the overall software architecture of the system at its current stage of development. This network management system if specifically designed to address issues relevant for complex heterogeneous networks consisting of seamlessly interoperable terrestrial and satellite networks. Network management systems are a key element for interoperability in such networks. We describe the integration of configuration management and performance management. The next step in this integration is fault management. In particular we describe the object model, issues of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), browsing tools and performance data graphical widget displays, management, information database (MIB) organization issues. Several components of the system are being commercialized by Hughes Networks Systems. A revised version of this technical report has been published in Proceedings of the AIAA: 16th International Communications Satellite Systems Conference and Exhibit, Part 1, pp. 490-500, Washington, D.C., February 25- 29, 1996.</ul

Attention Paper: How Generative AI Reshapes Digital Shadow Industry?

The rapid development of digital economy has led to the emergence of various black and shadow internet industries, which pose potential risks that can be identified and managed through digital risk management (DRM) that uses different techniques such as machine learning and deep learning. The evolution of DRM architecture has been driven by changes in data forms. However, the development of AI-generated content (AIGC) technology, such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, has given black and shadow industries powerful tools to personalize data and generate realistic images and conversations for fraudulent activities. This poses a challenge for DRM systems to control risks from the source of data generation and to respond quickly to the fast-changing risk environment. This paper aims to provide a technical analysis of the challenges and opportunities of AIGC from upstream, midstream, and downstream paths of black/shadow industries and suggest future directions for improving existing risk control systems. The paper will explore the new black and shadow techniques triggered by generative AI technology and provide insights for building the next-generation DRM system

Anomaly Detection for Next-Generation Space Launch Ground Operations

NASA is developing new capabilities that will enable future human exploration missions while reducing mission risk and cost. The Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery (FDIR) project aims to demonstrate the utility of integrated vehicle health management (IVHM) tools in the domain of ground support equipment (GSE) to be used for the next generation launch vehicles. In addition to demonstrating the utility of IVHM tools for GSE, FDIR aims to mature promising tools for use on future missions and document the level of effort - and hence cost - required to implement an application with each selected tool. One of the FDIR capabilities is anomaly detection, i.e., detecting off-nominal behavior. The tool we selected for this task uses a data-driven approach. Unlike rule-based and model-based systems that require manual extraction of system knowledge, data-driven systems take a radically different approach to reasoning. At the basic level, they start with data that represent nominal functioning of the system and automatically learn expected system behavior. The behavior is encoded in a knowledge base that represents "in-family" system operations. During real-time system monitoring or during post-flight analysis, incoming data is compared to that nominal system operating behavior knowledge base; a distance representing deviation from nominal is computed, providing a measure of how far "out of family" current behavior is. We describe the selected tool for FDIR anomaly detection - Inductive Monitoring System (IMS), how it fits into the FDIR architecture, the operations concept for the GSE anomaly monitoring, and some preliminary results of applying IMS to a Space Shuttle GSE anomaly

Conceptual structures for modeling in CIM

The International Standards Organization (ISO) will release in 1993 the first version of the STEP standard, which is dedicated to the exchange of product model data, and is seen as the basis of the next generation of enterprise information modeling tools. Almost in the same time frame ANSI will release the Information Resource Dictionary System(IRDS) Conceptual Schema standard, which recommends the conceptual graphs (CGs) or other representation languages based on logic to be used for enterprise information modeling and integration. In this paper we develop the foundations for the utilization of conceptual structures (CS) in combination with EXPRESS and STEP Application Protocols in the field of Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM). The most important result described here is a mapping of EXPRESS into CGs. Around it we develop the architecture of a system able to analyze and translate some of the semantics of information models. Our overall strategy consists of representing the semantics of the language, including the informal meanings represented in the EXPRESS manual in plain English, in a systematic way in CS, and then use this block of knowledge, that can be processed by a machine, for the increasingly automatic analysis, translation and integration of enterprise information models. The work here described is one of the components of a prototype of a model management system under development at IBM, Kingston NY, coordinated by the CIM Architecture group

Event management of large distributed system and network management environments

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Information Technology.Co-ordinated event management across system, network and application environments is a challenging task. The wide diversity of industry and commercial standards, differing business and technical requirements and a huge variety of environments mean there are no simple solutions. This thesis proposes a highly scaleable, flexible and resilient event management architecture that has been applied to the outsourcing activities of HP Services worldwide. Our solution is based on industry standards such as SNMP and commercial products. It provides a framework for all aspects of event management, including event detection, logging, notification, and correlation. It was initially applied and refined in an outsourcing IT environment, then further developed in larger outsourcing environments. It was developed using a standard solution architecture methodology (known as ITSA) that enabled the partly developed architectures to be continually refined, improved and deployed. The technology aspects of the solution work closely with ITIL event management processes. To achieve a unified event display and a standardised event message format, all events from all sources are reduced to a standard format that includes the “raw” event information plus business intelligence, called the business string, added to the event for display and routing purposes. This extra information identifies the nature of the event and allows filtered displays of events. It is extracted from configuration management extensions added to the standard event management tools. The extended format is flexible enough to handle the different commercial tools. The first generation of the solution was based on Computer Associates’ Unicenter TNG and was called the Event Monitoring Utility (EMU). This was later significantly extended by switching to HP OpenView, and the extra development of further central event management functions, especially event correlation, in a solution called DECADE. Significant agent extensions were achieved by the creation and deployment of a solution called SMSPI, which included an extended configuration management and policy database, and further event automation. The extended solution is now deployed across HP Services’ entire global outsourced environment. The solution has proven very successful, winning two Computer Associates Software Achievement Awards, including the Grand Prize, and generating two US patents. It will be progressively deployed to several million servers and network devices globally over the next few years. The work described here is at once self-contained and a basis for on-going development of event management in the face of ever more complex systems, and increasing demands for more detailed event management

Model based code generation for distributed embedded systems

Embedded systems are becoming increasingly complex and more distributed. Cost and quality requirements necessitate reuse of the functional software components for multiple deployment architectures. An important step is the allocation of software components to hardware. During this process the differences between the hardware and application software architectures must be reconciled. In this paper we discuss an architecture driven approach involving model-based techniques to resolve these differences and integrate hardware and software components. The system architecture serves as the underpinning based on which distributed real-time components can be generated. Generation of various embedded system architectures using the same functional architecture is discussed. The approach leverages the following technologies – IME (Integrated Modeling Environment), the SAE AADL (Architecture Analysis and Design Language), and Ocarina. The approach is illustrated using the electronic throttle control system as a case study