Policy-based Management has been largely studied during the last years. The Internet Engineering Task force (IETF) has more recently introduced the Policy Based Networking as a mean for managing the IP networks according to the new constraints defined in the network such as the guarantee of the Quality of service (QoS). The network managed based on policies, is modelled as a state machine which...

I establish a folk theorem for a model of repeated elections with adverse selection: when citizens are sufficiently patient, arbitrary policy paths through arbitrarily large regions of the policy space can be supported by a refinement of perfect Bayesian equilibrium. Politicians are policy-motivated (so office benefits cannot be used to incentivize policy choices), the policy space is one-dimen...

This paper discusses the concept of Europeanization in the light of recent research on the impact of the European Union politics and policy. Conceptual analysis is preliminary to empirical analysis. Accordingly, I examine the risk of ‘concept stretching’, discuss extension and intension of Europeanization, and propose a taxonomy to ‘unpack’ the concept and organize empirical research. The expla...

Stochastic Constraint Programming is an extension of Constraint Programming for modelling and solving combinatorial problems involving uncertainty. A solution to such a problem is a policy tree that specifies decision variable assignments in each scenario. Several solution methods have been proposed but none seems practical for large multi-stage problems. We propose an incomplete approach: spec...

To find the optimal policy for large Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where state space explosion makes analytic methods infeasible, we turn to statistical methods. In this work, we apply Monte Carlo Tree Search to learning the optimal policy for a MDP with respect to a Probabilistic Bounded Linear Temporal Logic property. After we have the policy, we can proceed with statistical model checkin...

This paper discusses the enhancement of security in general purpose operating systems, especially related to threats caused by internetworking, using extensions to operating systems. Such mechanisms have a significantly larger basis for reaching security policy decisions than older host-level security mechanisms and firewalls. By layering defensive mechanisms yet enforcing a consistent security...

In this paper we describe an XML-based platform for dynamic active node policy updates. XML supports the definition of specific policy languages, their extension to satisfy new needs and the management of deployed policies on different active nodes. We show an example of the management of router packet forwarding policies where the XML policies that drive the packet routing are updated at run-t...

We present the Explicit Kernel Rewards Regression (EKRR) approach, as an extension of Kernel Rewards Regression (KRR), for Optimal Policy Identification in Reinforcement Learning. The method uses the Structural Risk Minimisation paradigm to achieve a high generalisation capability. This explicit version of KRR offers at least two important advantages. On the one hand, finding a near-optimal pol...

The UML is the de facto standard for system specification, but offers little specialized support for the specification and analysis of policies. This paper presents Deontic STAIRS, an extension of the UML sequence diagram notation with customized constructs for policy specification. The notation is underpinned by a denotational trace semantics. We formally define what it means that a system sat...

Recently, there has been an increased amount of attention dedicated to WS-Policy it has become a W3C submission and a working group was formed to standardize the specification. In our previous work, we provided a mapping of WS-Policy to OWL-DL. In this paper, we continue that work by analyzing the operation of policy intersection (determining whether two web service policies are compatible). We...