Jump Over Left Menu Maintenance of Large Computer Systems M H J
Baylis The Engineer's Assistant Artificial Intelligence 3 This
paper describes some of the difficulties in maintaining large
computer systems and considers how machine perception techniques
can be applied to the problem. A program called the 'engineer's
assistant is described as a step in the right direction.
Elaborations are made on the meaning of the right direction, and
an experimental implementation of some of these ideas is
described. A large computer system is usually maintained by a
team of engineers. Inevitably these tend to be of different
abilities, and some of them become more knowledgeable and
therefore more proficient than others in specific areas of the
machine. Although computer down time has become more expensive
by an order of magnitude on present large systems compared to
the last generation, the engineers are not mending faults an
order of magnitude faster. Moreover some faults which can occur
nowadays are considerably more com