Telco Network Inventory Validation with NoHR

Network database inventory is a critical tool for the operations of any telecommunication company, by supporting network configuration and maintenance, as well as troubleshooting of network incidents. Whereas an incorrect inventory can often lead to severe implications and financial losses, the sheer size of a telecommunication network, the number of equipment involved, and other operational constraints, often lead to outdated inconsistent inventories, which are usually validated and updated by hand, during change management processes – a time-consuming task highly prone to human error. In this paper, we describe a solution to automate the validation of network inventories within the context of a multinational telecommunication company, with operations in several different countries, using NoHR, a reasoner that allows the user to query (hybrid) knowledge bases composed of ontologies and non-monotonic rules, both of which are necessary to perform the kind of reasoning required by this task. In addition, to address severe performance issues – essentially in terms of memory – resulting from NoHR v3.0’s need to pre-process the entire database into OWL assertions or rule facts, in this paper, we also present v4.0 of NoHR, which extends NoHR v3.0 with native support for Databases, solving not only the memory consumption problems, but also improving the average reasoning times.