Automatic policy conflict analysis for cross-domain collaborations using semantic temporal logic

Policy-based methods simplify the management of cross-domain collaborations by establishing policies to control various cross-domain activities involved in those collaborations. Administrators and users from participant domains can use policies to define control rules and restrictions, and to configure execution environments for these collaborations. To detect and resolve potential dynamic conflicts between different administrative domains, Semantic Temporal Logic (STL) is proposed and implemented in this paper to automatically analyze policy conflicts. STL incorporates relationships between different policy elements into temporal logic using a semantic format (ontology). A prototype system in the Web services environment is implemented to illustrate the capability of STL and the dynamic policy analysis framework utilizing STL.