We apologise if you get duplicate copies of this
Policy 2001: Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks
29-31 January 2001
Hosted by: HP Laboratories, Bristol, UK
Technical Co-sponsored by IEEE ComSoc
See: http://www-dse.doc.ic.ac.uk/events/policy-2001/
for programme and registration forms
Policy based systems are the subject of a wide range of activities in
universities, standardisation bodies and within industry. They have a
wide spectrum of applications ranging from quality of service management
within networks to security and enterprise modelling. This workshop will
provide a forum for discussion and collaboration between researchers,
developers and users of policy based systems. It will bring together the
various communities working on policy and follows on from the successful
informal Policy Workshop held in November 1999 (see
http://www-dse.doc.ic.ac.uk/events/policy-99/).
Within the Internet community there is considerable interest in Policy
Based Networking. A number of companies have announced tools to support
the specification and deployment of policies. Much of this work is focused
on policies for quality of service management within networks and the
Internet Engineering and Distributed Management Task Forces (IETF/DMTF) is
actively working on standards related to this area (see
http://www-dse.doc.ic.ac.uk/research/policies for links).
The Security community has focused on the specification and analysis of
access control policy which has evolved into the work on Role-Based Access
Control (RBAC). There has been work over a number of years in the
academic community on specification and analysis of policies for
Distributed Systems mostly concentrating on authorisation policies.
Although there are strong similarities in the concepts and techniques used
by the different communities there is no commonly accepted terminology or
notation for specifying policy.
Several research groups are looking at high-level aspects of policy
related to Enterprise Modelling. An ISO Open Distributed Processing
working group is defining Policy and Role concepts within the Enterprise
Viewpoint. Enterprise goals or Service Level Agreements can be considered
as high-level abstract policies which must be progressively refined into
implementable policies. The work on the specification and analysis of
Business Rules is also relevant.
The common concept of policy, within all of the above communities, is that
polices define a set of rules governing choices in the behaviour of the
system. The motivation is to be able to modify policy in order to change
system behaviour without having to re-implement the system, or restructure
the requirements specification.
__________________________________________________
Professor Morris Sloman
Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine
Department of Computing
180 Queen's Gate
London SW7 2BZ, U.K.
Phone: +44 20 7594 8279 Fax: +44 20 7581 8024
Email: m.sloman AT doc.ic.ac DOT uk
WWW: http://www-dse.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mss
Policy 2001: Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, HP
Laboratories, Bristol, 29-31 Jan. 2001
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