An Enhanced Policy Model to Enable Autonomic Communications

Abstract

The Policy Expert Group of the Autonomic Communications Forum is working to enhance policy to enable flexible control of self-governed systems. The initial effort focuses on proposed enhancements to the DEN-ng policy model to serve as a baseline from which the ACF Policy Model can be developed . This enhanced policy model incorporates traditional (eventcondition-action) and deontic policy representations for policy rules, and provides a modular distributed structure for policy applications. DEN-ng Policy Model Core FrameworkPolicies commonly follow a standard eventcondition-action (ECA) model. A simplified conceptual model of an ECA policy rule works as follows: specified events are monitored, and these events are used to trigger the evaluation of the conditions of one or more policy rules. If the conditions of a policy rule are matched, then one or more policy actions specified by that policy rule may be executed. If the conditions are not matched, one or more alternative policy actions that are optionally specified by that policy rule may instead be executed. Figure 1 shows the core framework of the new DEN-ng policy model (note that this is different from the DEN-ng policy model described in [4], but the same as that described in [32]). A PolicyConcept is an Fifth IEEE Workshop on Engineering of Autonomic and Autonomous Systems 978-0-7695-3140-3/08 $25.00

The design of a novel context-aware policy model to support machine-based learning and reasoning

“…7. More detail is provided in [2]. PolicyConflictApplications enable policy conflict detection and/or resolution applications to be defined.…”