Formal Specification of Domain-Specific ECA Policy Models

Formal Specification of Domain-Specific ECA Policy Models

Policy-based management allows to adapt systems to changed requirements in a flexible and automated way. For the effective development of policies it is desired to specify them at a high level of abstraction initially and to refine them until they are represented in a machine-executable way. We use models to specify event-condition-action (ECA) policies at different levels of abstraction and consequently separate domain and policy aspects from each other. Domain-specific concepts are used within policies in their event, condition, and action parts. We present a formal specification of the models by means of a relational algebra. The algebra is used to 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.