Patent attributes
A service system receives a request for problem resolution knowledge from a service requestor. Upon receiving the request, the service system identifies candidate patterns where each candidate pattern has at least one element that characterizes a problem associated with the corresponding pattern. An iterative process is then repeated between the service requestor and the service system until a stopping criterion is met, which attempts to narrow the field of candidate patterns down until one or more possible root causes of the problem experienced by the service requestor are identified. Alternatively, it may be determined that a possible root cause of the problem is not contained in the candidate patterns or that some other action, event, etc., interrupts the iterative process.