Incremental validation of policy-based systems

Management and control of systems are becoming more and more automated and based on policies that are expressed in a suitable policy specification language. Such policies need to be validated to ensure correct operation of the managed or controlled systems. The set of policies in a system is dynamic and is constantly changing. When this set is very large, incremental policy validation is a topic worth exploring. In this paper, such a notion of incremental policy-validation is introduced. The well-known decision tables, a systems analysis tool, are adapted for representing policies. Based on such adaptations, two algorithms are developed for incremental validation and they are compared, with respect to the number of computations they require.

1. Introduction

Policy based systems offer the capabilities to dynamically change the behavior of software. Such systems are gaining wide popularity in the industry today. Applications for these systems range from event notification software [1], [2], [3] to network management [4], [5], [6], [7] to electronic commerce [8], [9].