A Model for Static Conflict Analysis of Management Policies

Management of today's distributed systems is becoming increasingly complex. There is an obvious requirement for a flexible mechanism to help manage such systems. Rule-based management is one such mechanism. However, in order for rule-based management to become widely usable a method is required by which conflicts between management policies (defined as rules) can be identified and resolved. This paper creates a set theoretic model for rules as a trituple of the relationship between the subject, action and target of a policy. It also identifies two classes of policy set — 'syntactically easy policy set' (SEPS) and 'syntactically non-easy policy set' (SNEPS). SEPSs are policies which are sets of all the Cartesian products of its subjects, actions and targets, whereas SNEPSs are only a subset of that Cartesian product. Conflict analysis of SEPSs has been handled in other papers; this paper addresses conflict analysis of SNEPSs. A method for resolving conflict is suggested. The paper also raises some issues that arise when considering a database of policies.