Belgian firm NetworkMining has launched a network incident simulator for telecom carriers that uses actual transport layer inventory databases to simulate a network failure and project its impact. The simulator is a new module within the NetworkObjects reporting and analysis software, which maps a telecom network’s transport layer infrastructure. The simulator propagates a fault and its knock-on effects through discrete event simulation. Results are displayed according to the impact of the failure — trails and paths that will go down are displayed first, followed by those that will undergo protection switching, then those that will experience reduced throughput. The simulator can also do network-wide reliability analysis and rank single link failure points by potential impact. According to the company, the application was field-tested for two years with more than one carrier before its release.