PLANNING SYSTEM FOR BROADBAND MULTI-SERVICE CONNECTIONS

A syntactical representation is used to generate data describing a hierarchical broadband network and relationships between its elements. The format of the syntactical representation resembles logic programming language clauses. The syntactical representation is used to specify a broadband connection problem to be solved. Data describing physical resources and functionality of a set of network elements is entered into an inference engine which applies an algorithm to its input in order to find a solution to a specified connections planning problem. The algorithm is recursive and uses artificial intelligence techniques such as first fail, hierarchical planning and hill-climbing to guide the inference engine's search for a solution.