A bayesian network-based knowledge engineering framework for IT service management

Service management is becoming more and more important within the area of IT management. How to efficiently manage and organize service in complicated IT service environments with frequent changes is a challenging issue. IT service and the related information from different sources are characterized as diverse, incomplete, heterogeneous, and geographically distributed. It is hard to consume these complicated services without knowledge assistant. To address this problem, a systematic way (with proposed toolsets and process) is proposed to tackle the challenges of acquisition, structuring, and refinement of structured knowledge. An integrated knowledge process is developed to guarantee the whole engineering procedure which utilizes Bayesian networks (BNs) as the knowledge model. This framework can be successfully applied on key tasks in service management, such as problem determination and change impact analysis, and a real example of Cisco VoIP system is introduced to show the usefulness of this method.