Policy-based systems for telecommunications and web services

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The concept of policy is gaining prominence in the area of telecommunications and web services.   In the most general sense, a policy is a directive from a user to a system that it should behave in a certain way in certain circumstances.   We concentrate on two issues in this framework: architecture and consistency. The architecture problem is the problem of devising appropriate system architectures by which policies can be stored and retrieved at appropriate decision moments. Different architectures are appropriate for different applications, so this part of the research will be application and platform oriented. Rigorous software design methods will be used. The consistency problem is the problem of determining that the set of policies as a whole is consistent, i.e. that there are no situations where one policy will lead to one decision, and another will lead to a different and incompatible decision. Logic-based methods will be used in this part, in particular deduction methods and model-checking methods. We envisage three main application areas: 1) devising systems architectures for different types of policy-based systems, with particular attention to policy-directed Internet telephony and web services 2) precisely specifying  policy systems for the purpose of semantic analysis; extending this work to the area of web systems 3) applying similar principles to the area of electronic contracts