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SymCure
Version 5.1 Rev. 1
Readme

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(August 2007)

## Contents

This document describes SymCure Version 5.1 Rev. 1.

- What is SymCure?

- Gensym Customer Support

## What is SymCure?

Fault management plays a vital role across a broad spectrum of commercial and industrial applications, ranging from service level management and telecommunications network management in the Information Technology (IT) world, to abnormal condition management in manufacturing, chemical, oil and gas industries. The size and complexity of these applications often necessitates automated expert system support for fault management. A small number of root cause problems in IT communication networks often result in a large number of messages and alarms that cannot be handled by human operators in real time. Failure to identify and repair the root cause problems results in increased system downtime and poor service levels. Abnormal conditions in manufacturing and processing plants may result in unplanned shutdowns, equipment damage, safety hazards, reduced productivity, and poor quality products. A study funded by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) estimates that in the absence of adequate fault management, billions of dollars are spent in addressing the problems caused by equipment failure, degradation, process drift, and operator overload.

Fault management across these industries shares some common goals, such as improving application availability and utilization, reducing operator overload, and minimizing operation costs. In order to achieve these goals, it is necessary to develop fault management tools with the following capabilities.

- Symptom monitoring. Symptoms are manifestations of underlying root causes and must be monitored to detect the occurrence of problems as soon as they happen.

- Diagnosis identifies the root causes of known symptoms. (Diagnosis is also often referred to as fault isolation.) Some studies have shown that 80% of the fault management effort is spent in identifying root causes after the manifestation of symptoms.

- Correlation is the process of recognizing and organizing groups of events that are causally related to each other - usually such events share one or more root causes - for diagnostic inference and presentation to system operators.

- Prediction. Early prediction of the impacts of underlying root causes before the effects are manifested is critical for proactive maintenance, safety, and optimal system utilization.

- Testing. In large systems, it is impractical and sometimes impossible to monitor every variable. Instead key observable variables are monitored to generate symptom events. Diagnostic inference typically identifies a set of suspected root causes. Additional variables can then be examined by running associated tests to complete the diagnosis process.

- Automated recovery. Identifying and automating recovery procedures allows for growth in equipment, processes, and services, without increasing the supervisory burden on system operators.

- Notification. Operators must be notified of the presence of root causes and their potential impacts. Raw alarms, which can overload an operator with redundant information, must be replaced with concise diagnostic summaries of root causes and their impacts.

- Postmortem. Information from the diagnostic problem solving is fed back to the fault management system for historic record keeping and proactive fault management in the future.

SymCure (derived from "Symptom Cure") is a tool that addresses a number of fault management functions, including diagnosis, correlation, prediction, testing, automated recovery and notification. It provides a powerful object oriented model-based framework to specify, organize and store diagnosis knowledge in the form of a persistent, generic (i.e., class-level), graphical, fault propagation model library. It performs diagnosis and impact analysis by combining the fault propagation models with specific domain information and asynchronous incoming events at run time. Its reasoning process is capable of detecting and resolving multiple concurrent system failures. It integrates diagnostic reasoning, testing, and repair to provide a powerful set of fault management capabilities. It notifies the results of its diagnostic reasoning to external systems using messages and other suitable means. SymCure's fault models are generic, so they do not require any reconfiguration whenever there are changes in equipment, system topology, or system operating modes and they can be reused easily in different applications. SymCure's methodology is domain independent and it has been used for fault management in diverse applications across different industries, including abnormal condition management for heaters and service management for enterprise wide software systems .

## Gensym Customer Support

If you need help with the upgrade, use Helplink or contact Gensym Customer Support:

| Americas | Europe, Middle-East, Africa (EMEA)
Phone | 781-265-7301 | +31-71-5682622
Email | `service@gensym.com` | `service-ema@gensym.com`