GENp2-3: Circumscriptive Context Reasoning for Automated Network Management Operations

This paper presents a new approach for autonomic management of heterogeneous communication systems by featuring awareness of the surrounding environment´s context. The contribution of this work is two-fold; the first is the development of an overall management infrastructure which identifies the necessary components for future autonomic management systems, namely, a context plane, an adaptive policy plane, a logic plane and an event management plane. The second contribution is a new model of context that is based on event calculus and a new methodology for context inference based on circumscriptive reasoning. The model lends itself easily to an automated deduction process on primitive context knowledge to derive more complex context that can be used to efficiently guide the automated management operations.