7.3.1 Generic workflow

28.1003GPPLevels of autonomous networkManagement and orchestrationRelease 17TS

Following is the generic workflow for fault management:

Intent handling:

– Task A: Fault management control information generation. The group of tasks of generating the fault management related control information (e.g., control information for alarm filtering, fault recognition, root cause analysis, fault recovery) based on fault management intent (e.g. reduce fault recovery response time to a certain value, reduce network and service failure times to a certain value within a specific duration).

– Task B: Fault management intent fulfilment evaluation. The group of tasks of evaluating fault management intent fulfilment information (e.g. corresponding fault recovery response time is satisfied or not).

Awareness:

– Task C: Fault related information collection. The group of tasks which collect the alarm information and other fault related information (e.g. performance information and configuration information etc.).

– Task D: Alarm filtering. The group of tasks which filter the alarms collected in Task C based on the specified alarm filtering control information. A single network fault may generate a large number of correlative alarms over space and time, therefore it is considered advantageous to have methods filtering the redundant alarms. Reporting only effective alarms without redundant alarms would improve the efficiency of alarm management.

Analysis:

– Task E: Fault recognition. The group of tasks which recognize the fault based on the alarm information and other fault related information.

– Task F: Fault prediction. The group of tasks which predict the potential fault and its category based on the performance information and other fault related information.

– Task G: Fault demarcation. The group of tasks which analysis and determines the fault type and corresponding affected managed object (e.g. NE) based on the alarm information and other fault related information.

– Task H: Fault root cause analysis (RCA). The group of tasks which analyse the detailed root cause of the network and service failure.

– Task I: Fault recovery mechanism analysis. The group of tasks which analyse the possible fault recovery mechanisms based on the fault root cause, thereby generate the feasible options (e.g. recommended recovery solutions).

Decision:

– Task J: Fault management action evaluation and determination. The group of tasks which evaluate the feasible options and determine the fault recovery solutions and other corresponding actions (e.g. clear of alarms, storage and retrieval of alarms).

Execution:

– Task K: Fault management action execution. The group of tasks which execute the fault recovery actions and other corresponding actions.

Note: If the faulty resource has no redundancy (e.g. backup equipment/board/battery/transport link) and all the fall back recovery actions are not available nor effective, then the subsequent fault recovery actions (e.g. replace physical equipment/board/battery, repair the physical connector/fibre/cable, repair the power supply, etc.) are considered as beyond the capabilities of the telecom system. And those actions execution is excluded from the consideration of autonomous network level classification.