Patent ID: 7865906

Claim:
An apparatus for managing an association among at least two resources, each resource being modeled by a resource class and the association being modeled by an association class including a plurality of references to the corresponding resource classes, the apparatus comprising: a processor; and a memory coupled to the processor, wherein the memory comprises instructions which, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to: receive a request from a management application; identify at least one resource object, in memory of a data processing system, instantiating each resource class referenced in the association class; create an association object, in the memory of the data processing system, instantiating the association class for each combination of the resource objects; set at least one association property of each association object according to dynamic characteristics of the corresponding resource objects by: evaluating at least one resource property of each resource object in the association object; and calculating the at least one association property according to the corresponding at least one resource property; return each association object to the management application; and manage, by the management application, at least one resource of the data processing system, associated with the at least one resource object, based on the at least one association property of an association object corresponding to the at least one resource; and execute at least one predefined action on each association object based on the corresponding at least one association property.