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KTAS, A Telecommunications Corporation

KTAS has established a 24-hour Service Center whose business it is to handle problem reports from data network customers, survey the total telecommunications network, report on the present condition of the network, and to carry out repairs as needed.

The Service Center's Problem Hotline

The problem hotline is manned with primarily administrative personnel. These people are able, without any deeper technical insight, to receive error reports from a number of data networks. The error reports often come from the technical experts of large companies.

As a support function for the personnel receiving error reports, an advisory system has been developed in ESTA, which based on the customer's installation number can determine the type of circuit and thereafter provide information on the type of data network, pinpoint where the error is to be corrected etc.

The Service Center's Surveillance

The surveillance center is staffed with technicians using an Operations and Communication System capable of receiving alarms from the entire network. The same system enables the technician to perform modifications on new, processor-managed installations from a terminal. An expert system has been developed in ESTA to assist the technicians with fault diagnosis and corrections on digital telephone exchanges

Error Correction

When errors occur on hardware installations which are located far from the surveillance center, it is helpful to have an advisory system to remotely direct the error correction. If the system can handle only 20% of the possible errors, KTAS has found this covers 80% of the occurrences in the field.

Statoil, An Oil Company

On Statoil's drilling platforms in the North Sea there are approximately 1300 workers; most of them in their 40s. It is known that this group of people smoke a lot, their food is rich with cholesterol, and their opportunities for exercising are limited. For these reasons, an acute demand arose for coronary risk assessment, to monitor the workers' risk of angina pectoris or heart attack.

The platform's health office is staffed with nurses. While they are skilled at their jobs, assessment of someone's coronary risk profile is usually a doctor's job. Moreover, the Industrial Medical Service has required that a system be put into place where everyone is examined based on identical criteria and where workers can be reexamined on the same criteria some months later.

An advisory system built with ESTA expresses the coronary risk profile as a number and psychological advice is given along with the dialog. SANOCOR has been in use for several years and is very popular among the users. Most of them are running their fourth or fifth consultation to see if they can reduce their risk number.

SAS, An Airline Company

Scandinavian Airlines Systems' coordination of air traffic is carried out in the Movement Control Center by 30 people working in groups of 4 in day-and-night shifts. Coordinating the traffic involves many factors from allocating flights, maintenance, time schedules etc. and SAS has several large applications to assist in this work. The air traffic also depends on another very important factor, the weather.

Air traffic coordinators must take the weather into consideration, and SAS has a system dedicated to give information on weather forecasts, the actual weather observations around the world and what impact it may have on different airports. The information is presented with many letter codes in shape of colors, prefixes, suffixes, text in boxes, text in inverse etc. All together these codes and their combinations make it somewhat difficult to decode or remember the meaning of the information, especially those which occur only rarely.

For assistance in decoding the weather information, SAS has made an advisory system in ESTA. The system is resident for immediate support in this part of the traffic coordination.

The Civil Defence and Emergency Planning Agency

The Danish Inspectorate of Nuclear Installations, which is a division of the Danish Civil Defense and Emergency Planning Agency, has among many duties the task of gathering and preparing information in nuclear matters for government, media and the public. A small group of specialists knows a lot about nuclear technology, all the different power stations and their generic characteristics as well as applicable preparedness plans In the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident a decision was made to set up a computer-aided information center for providing information to the public in case of a nuclear emergency. A pilot project was formed in 1992. The computer system will offer two user levels: a non-specialist level for information center operators in an emergency situation and an expert level for daily use in the nuclear inspectorate. It will offer detailed information about foreign nuclear installations combined with geographical maps as well as advice on health matters.

An application has been developed using ESTA for Windows. The application supports both levels of advice and consists of a hierarchy of knowledge bases, combining textual and graphical questions and answers.