Dynamic conflict detection in policy-based management systems

While advances in open distributed systems have undoubtedly provided a uniquely diverse environment for users, managing the resources within such an environment has become an increasingly complex task. This challenge has been considered for several years within the distributed systems management research community and we have recently seen policy-based management emerge as one such promising exemplification. The focus of our work has been predominantly on supporting the requirements of large evolving enterprises. Such environments present a significant challenge for policy-based management as the fluidity and complexity of interactions occurring in such environments mean that prevailing static-based specification and analysis of policies and roles, would be inadequate in many instances. We are therefore interested in providing support for a dynamic policy-based management environment. This paper discusses the critical nature of providing both dynamic and static conflict detection and resolution and introduces a scalable computationally-efficient dynamic conflict detection mechanism.