Policy conflict detection and resolution in goal policy-driven management

Abstract

Facing the growing scale and complexity of today's large distributed systems, especially when they are boosted up by wireless and mobile technologies, the policy-driven approach has become an appealing way for system management, which enables administrators to express their management intentions and constraints in the form of policies, and then authorise the policy-driven modules to perform some management tasks autonomously, according to these pre-designed policies. However, many problems need to be resolved before the implementation of the policy-driven approach, one of them is policy conflict management. Actually, there have been several discussions on action policy conflict, but barely any about goal policy conflict. In this paper, we introduce the topic of policy conflict in the entire life cycle of policies in the goal policy-driven management, make some initial moves towards goal policy conflict detection and resolution, propose and analyse a novel method to detection goal policy conflict.