Policy conflict analysis in distributed system management

TLDR

Distributed system management relies on policies to guide large‑scale systems, and while automation can support managers, it also introduces potential policy conflicts that must be analyzed. The authors propose a policy model that can be interpreted by the system itself and outline approaches for preventing and resolving conflicts. They analyze policy overlap types, mapping them to known conflict categories, and suggest prevention and resolution strategies within a deontic logic framework. The study summarizes the policy model and demonstrates that the overlap analysis aligns with several established policy conflict types.

Abstract

Distributed system management is concerned with the tasks needed to ensure that large distributed systems can function in accordance with the objectives of their users. These objectives are typically set out in the form of policies that are interpreted by the system managers. There are benefits to be gained by providing automated support for human managers, or actually automating routine management tasks. To do this, it is desirable to have a model of policies as objects that can be interpreted by the system itself. The model is summarized. It is clear that there is the potential for conflicts between policies. These conflicts may be resolved informally by human managers, but if an automated system is to recognize them and resolve them appropriately, first it is necessary to analyze the types of conflict that may occur. We analyze the types of overlap that may occur between policies, and show that this analysis corresponds to several familiar types of policy conflict. Some possible approaches to the prevention and resolution of conflicts are suggested, and this work is put into the context of other work on policies and related areas, including deontic logic.