A declarative approach to automated configuration

Abstract

System administrators increasingly use declarative, object-oriented languages to configure their systems. Extending such systems with automated analysis and decision making is an area of active research. We introduce ConfSolve, an object-oriented declarative configuration language, in which logical constraints over a system can be specified. Verification, impact analysis or even the generation of valid configurations can then be performed, by translation to a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), which is solved with an off-the-shelf solver. We present a full definition of our language and its compilation process, and show that our implementation outperforms previous work utilising an SMT solver, while adding new features such as optimisation.