Patent ID: 8006290

Claim:
A method for ratifying a policy in a policy-based decision system, comprising: determining that a new policy interacts with an existing policy in the policy-based decision system; determining that the new policy conflicts with the existing policy by using a domain elimination algorithm; resolving the conflict between the new policy and the existing policy, wherein resolving the conflict between the new policy and the existing policy comprises displaying to a policy author information indicative of how to modify the new policy so that the conflict between the new policy and the existing policy can be resolved; and ratifying the new policy to exist in the policy-based decision system in response to the conflict between the new policy and the existing policy being resolved, determining a priority of the new policy with respect to the existing policy; assigning a priority value to the new policy, and reassigning a priority value to the existing policy if the priority value of the new policy is higher than the priority value of the existing policy wherein the method is performed using a microprocessor, wherein the domain elimination algorithm uses the following conjunctive Boolean expression i=1 n B i , B i =x c i , where c i , xεD and ε{=, <, ≦, >, ≧}, and each atomic Boolean expression B i restricts the domain of x to D i ⊂ D, wherein the algorithm works by examining the Boolean expressions B i one by one, and computing R l =∩ i=1 l B i at each step, where x is the new policy, D is a domain of existing policies, c i is a constant and R n is the solution of the algorithm indicating the result of the conflict determination.