Dynamic policies through contextsensitive situations

1
Dynamic policies through context-sensitive
situations

• Opher Etzion
• IBM Research Laboratory in Haifa

2
An Example AAA Flower Delivery

• An AAA (anyplace anytime any flower) service
  delivery on the web is being created. The
  customer can send to anywhere in the world
  
• AAA is a virtual store, it should acquire
• Billing services using credit cards
• Shopping cart services to accumulate flowers
• Payment to supplier service
• Bid of flower shops
• Bid of delivery companies
• Each of them is considered as a separate service.
  A combination of billing server, cart server,
  payment server, flower shop and delivery company
  may be unique to each engagement, hence the
  dynamic settingt .

3
Key Concepts

• Context
• Situation
• Action
• Policy

4
Context

• Temporal element (a collection of time
  intervals)
  
• Bounded by two events (work hours)
• Can be composite (work hours when I am in the
  office and not in a meeting).
  
• Can have spatial properties

5
Situation

• A trigger for reaction
• A (possible uncertain) predicate over the history
  of events. Examples
  
• Amazons stock is down 3 percent over 2 hours.
• At least 3 times during a day, a single customer
  purchased and then sold the same stock with a
  value of at least 1,000,000.

6
Action

• A program that reacts to a situation
• Examples
• Various types of alerts (publish/subscribe)
• A stock buy/sell program
• A database update
• Work re-schedule
• Dynamic workflow creation.

7
Policy

• In a given context, if a situation occurs, select
  (or create) and execute action (s).

8
An Example AAA Flower Delivery

• An AAA (anyplace anytime any flower) service
  delivery on the web is being created. The
  customer can send to anywhere in the world
  
• AAA is a virtual store, it should acquire
• Billing services using credit cards
• Shopping cart services to accumulate flowers
• Payment to supplier service
• Bid of flower shops
• Bid of delivery companies
• Each of them is considered as a separate service.
  A combination of billing server, cart server,
  payment server, flower shop and delivery company
  may be unique to each engagement, hence the
  dynamic setting.

9
Monitoring Examples

• IT example
• the billing service application has been down for
  10 minutes, thus contact alternative billing
  services next 5 minutes, and monitor its status
  at that time.
• Business process example
• Delivery company A that uses trucks will unlikely
  (0.8) to deliver on time, because of blocking
  road. An automatic decision, based on economic
  factors is carried out whether to ignore the
  situation, or issue another shipment from the
  flower store F, and company B who can deliver on
  time due to their locations.

10
Conclusion

• The work on dynamic policies is applicable to
  many domains (CRM, system management, business
  process management, command and control)
  
• By now we have worked on contexts and
  situations.
  
• Current work concentrates on actions and policies.