Generic Policy Conflict Handling Using a priori Models

The promise of policy-based management is lessened by the risk of conflicts between policies. Even with careful conception of the policies it is difficult if not impossible to avoid conflicts completely. However, it is in principle possible to detect and resolve conflicts either statically or at runtime. Taking advantage of existing managed systems models it is even possible to detect and resolve policy conflicts not addressed until now. In this paper we present a generic approach to automated policy conflict detection based on existing knowledge about a managed system. We describe a methodology to derive conflict definitions from invariants of managed systems models, and show how these can be used to detect and resolve policy conflicts automatically.