Abstract

Modern distributed systems contain a large number of objects, and must be capable of evolving, without shutting down the complete system, to cater for changing requirements. There is a need for distributed, automated management agents whose behavior also has to dynamically change to reflect the evolution of the system being managed. Policies are a means of specifying and influencing management behavior within a distributed system, without coding the behavior into the manager agents. Our approach is aimed at specifying implementable policies, although policies may be initially specified at the organizational level (c.f. goals) and then refined to implementable actions. We are concerned with two types of policies. Authorization policies specify what activities a manager is permitted or forbidden to do to a set of target objects and are similar to security accesscontrol policies. Obligation policies specify what activities a manager must or must not do to a set of target objects and essen...

Citations