Policy Management across Multiple Platforms and Application Domains

One of the challenges of building a policy management framework is making it flexible enough to handle differences in both policy semantics and enforcement strategies across multiple platforms and application domains. The system must be expressive enough in each application domain to provide the richness needed for interesting policies. It must also provide a simple and flexible enforcement mechanism for adaptation to a variety of systems. In this paper we discuss the application of the KAoS policy services framework to human-robot teamwork - an application that involves a variety of application domains and enforcement at different levels of control; from low level network resource control to high level organizational constraints and coordination management. The study culminated in an outdoor field exercise that required coordination of mixed sub teams composed of two people and five robots whose task was to find and apprehend an intruder on a Navy pier.