Communication network engineering in enterprise environments is traditionally a complex, time-consuming, and error-prone manual process. Most research on network engineering automation has concentrated on configuration synthesis, often overlooking changes in the physical network topology. This paper introduces GeNet, a multimodal co-pilot for enterprise network engineers. GeNet is a novel framework that leverages a large language model (LLM) to streamline network design workflows. It uses visual and textual modalities to interpret and update network topologies and device configurations based on user intents. GeNet was evaluated on enterprise network scenarios adapted from Cisco certification exercises. Our results demonstrate GeNet's ability to interpret network topology images accurately, potentially reducing network engineers' efforts and accelerating network design processes in enterprise environments. Furthermore, we show the importance of precise topology understanding when handling intents that require modifications to the network's topology.

翻译：企业环境中的通信网络工程传统上是一个复杂、耗时且易出错的手动过程。大多数网络工程自动化的研究集中于配置合成，往往忽视了物理网络拓扑的变化。本文介绍了GeNet，一款面向企业网络工程师的多模态协同设计助手。GeNet是一个创新框架，利用大语言模型（LLM）来简化网络设计工作流。它通过视觉与文本模态，基于用户意图来解析并更新网络拓扑及设备配置。GeNet在基于思科认证练习改编的企业网络场景中进行了评估。我们的结果表明，GeNet能够准确解析网络拓扑图像，有望减少网络工程师的工作负担，并加速企业环境中的网络设计流程。此外，我们还展示了在处理需要修改网络拓扑的意图时，精确理解拓扑结构的重要性。