Implementation of a Management Agent fo r Interpreting Obligation Policy

Distributing management functionality into intelligent management agents has now been accepted as the way to manage large scale distributed systems. However, it is necessary to easily change the functionality of the agents to adapt to changing application requirements. Agents which interpret policy can have their behaviour changed by modifying the policies loaded in them. This paper gives an overview of a management policy notation which can be used to define both authorisation policies (what activities a manager is permitted or forbidden to do) and obligation policies (the activities a manager must or must not perform). We also give an overview of the tools for specifying, refining and storing policies in domains. The emphasis of the paper is on the implementation issues for an obligation policy interpreter. The manager agents are implemented using a Tcl interpreter within a CORBA Distributed Programming environment.