Candour

Project Summary

CANDOUR is an intelligent fault diagnostic toolkit. The research was driven by a need for BT to minimise the cost of operating its Broadband product range, but has been designed to be applied in a wide range of applications.

Existing broadband diagnostic solutions focus on specific aspects of broadband problem diagnosis and have yielded significant benefits. Our CANDOUR toolkit is intended to address the problem at multiple network layers and from multiple user (ISPs, NPs) viewpoints.

We have developed a novel AI approach to improve diagnostic effectiveness and to reduce operation costs in comparison with existing approaches. A particular objective was to incorporate self-learning capabilities to allow the system to adapt to new products without the need for expensive human intervention. Initial evaluation shows good results, so the next stage is a trial deployment.

The CANDOUR toolkit is implemented using standard commercial products. The result is an XML-based component toolkit that provides the benefits of flexibility, scalability and straighforward deployment with low incremental costs.