CANASTA: The Crash Analysis Troubleshooting Assistant

CANASTA (crash analysis troubleshooting assistant) is a Digital proprietary knowledge-based system developed by the Artificial Intelligence Applications Group (AIAG) at Digital Equipment Corporation in collaboration with Digital's customer support centers (CSCs). It is targeted to assist computer support engineers at CSCs in analyzing operating system crashes, traditionally one of the most complex types of problems reported by customers. Digital started work on CANASTA in January 1988. A version of CANASTA that assists in the analysis of vms operating system crashes was successful: It is currently deployed at CSCs in over 20 countries and is used to resolve over 850 crash-related customer calls each month. It is estimated that in time savings alone, it saves Digital over 2 million dollars each year. CANASTA's success largely results from the innovative way in which it integrated different problem-solving modules that model the different types of problem-resolution strategies that experts use in this domain. These strategies include making quick checks (rule based) on whether the crash at hand is because of a known cause, using deeper analysis (decision tree–based) reasoning to resolve new types of crash prob