END: an expert network designer

Professional designers with intensive knowledge and experience are needed for large computer network design and optimization. Such designers must be well informed about the most recent up-dates in this rapidly advancing field to be able to handle the available state-of-the-art technologies. Since designers of such caliber are difficult to find and usually very expensive, the present authors propose the use of expert systems to play their role and/or assist them in their task. The authors discuss: system architecture and functionality, the OPNET network simulation package. They also present various network design examples