Modeling of Domain-Specific ECA Policies

Modeling of Domain-Specific ECA Policies

Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE 2011), pp. 52-58, Miami Beach, USA, July 2011

Policy-based management is a flexible approach for the management of complex systems as policies make context-sensitive and automated decisions. For their effective development it is desired to specify policies at a high level of abstraction initially and to refine them until they are represented in a machine-executable way. We present an approach for the modeling of event-condition-action (ECA) policies at different levels of abstraction. A relational algebra is used to formally specify and validate the models at each level. Finally, executable policy code is generated from the low-level models. The approach is generic as it can be applied to any domain and supports a flexible number of abstraction layers. It is applied to the network management domain and demonstrated with policies for coverage optimization in a mobile network.