Conflict analysis during authoring of management policies for federations

We outline a policy conflict analysis process for the analysis of newly specified federation-level policies against previously deployed local/federation policies. The process is generic in the sense that it can be employed by each domain participating in a federation to help maintain the consistency of their local system with that of the federation. The conflict analysis process utilises an information model and associated ontology for representing both the static and dynamic application-specific aspects of the local operating environment and the federation to aid in the detection of potential inconsistencies. It employs two algorithms, one for the selection of previously deployed policies related to the federation-level policy and the other for analysing the returned policies against the federation-level policy. The selection algorithm reduces the number of deployed policies required to be retrieved for analysis against any newly specified federation-level policy, while the conflict analysis algorithm detects inconsistencies relating to the conditional element of a policy rule. We discuss a concrete example in the form of a federated XMPP communication scenario.