Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/T29246/01
Title:	Reasoning Techniques for Analysis and Refinement of Policies for Quality of Service MANagement
Principal Investigator:	Russo, Professor A
Other Investigators:	Sloman, Professor M Lupu, Professor EC Dulay, Dr N
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Computing
Organisation:	Imperial College London
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	15 June 2005	Ends:	14 September 2005	Value (£):	23,143
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Networks & Distributed Systems
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Communications
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
Policy-based management has been proposed in recent years as a suitable means for managing Quality of Service (QoS) in IP networks. The proposed visiting fellowship aims to provide abductive and argumentation-based reasoning techniques to support policy analysis and refinements in distributed system for Quality of Service Management. The development of an abductive framework for formalising policies is expected to foster several advantages for policy analysis with automatic ways of policy validation and conflict detection. In particular, the use of abduction will facilitate the task of conflict resolution by suggesting ways in which the conflicts can be avoided. This is particularly important in scenarios where an overall goal must be realised by collaborating but distinct administrative domains, each one with their own policies. For example, in IP networks end-to-end Quality of Service must be guaranteed across multiple domains with potential inconsistencies. Abduction will facilitate the identification of an appropriate set of policies for each domain that does not conflict with their exiting policies. Another example of such a situation occurs when Virtual Organisations are created in order to provide new value added services by combining services from other (virtual) organisations. This is often referred to as policy negotiation or policy reconciliation.Professor Kakas has recently worked on argumentation, together with his collaborators, as a form of preference reasoning according to given policies and applied this to agent negotiations. Argumentation in this way provides a generalisation of abduction where integrity constraints are replaced by a preference theory of arguments . The consistency of a collection of policies can be examined by argumentative deliberation, which gives the preferred way(s) in which (distributed) policies can be consistently applied. For example, two desired properties may not both hold together in some particular special circumstances not considered at the initial time of setting out the policies. This inconsistency can be resolved by forming an argument why each property should hold, together with an appropriate priority between them.The combination of abduction and argumentation gives then a very powerful framework with enhanced capability for the automatic analysis and refinement of policies.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Organisation Website:	http://www.imperial.ac.uk