Given the increasing size and complexity of distributed systems, there is a growing need for a policy specification framework in which management policies for possibly automated managers can be expressed in a flexible manner. The requirements and concepts for such a framework are examined, and particular reference is made to applications to the security of distributed systems.
Relevant work is investigated, and conclusions are drawn.
The outstanding research issues are identified and a summary is given of the aim of future work. 36pp Behaviour analysis of complex concurrent systems has led to the search for enhanced reachability analysis techniques which support compositionality and which control the state explosion problem. While compositionality has been achieved, state explosion is still a problem. Indeed, this problem may even be exacerbated as a locally minimised subsystem may contain many states and transitions forbidden by its context or environment. This limits the practicality of using compositional reachability analysis.