A Policy Description Language

Jorge Lobo, Randeep Bhatia, Shamim A. Naqvi

Abstract: A policy describes principles or strategies for a plan of action designed to achieve a particular set of goals. We define a policy as a function that maps a series of events into a set of actions. In this paper we introduce PDC, a simple but expressive language to specify policies. The design of the language has been strongly influenced by the action languages of Geffner and Bonet (Geffner & Bonet 1998) and Gelfond and Lifschitz (Gelfond & Lifschitz 1993) and the composite temporal event language of Motakis and Zaniolo (Motakis & Zaniolo 1997). The semantics is founded on recent results on formal descriptions of action theories based on automata and their application to active databases. We summarize some complexity results on the hardness of evaluating polices and briefly describe the implementation of a policy server being used to provide centralized administration of a soft switch in a communication network.