CANASTA: The Crash Analysis Troubleshooting Assistant
Michael S. Register, Anil Rewari · 1991
CANASTA (crash analysis troubleshooting assistant) is a Digital propri-etary knowledge-based system developed by the Artificial Intelligence Applications Group (AIAG) at Digital Equipment Corporation in col-laboration with Digital’s customer support centers (CSCs). It is target-ed to assist computer support engineers at CSCs in analyzing operating system crashes, traditionally one of the most complex types of prob-lems 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 Dig-ital 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.