Specification and Refinement of Domain-Specific ECA Policies

Policy-based management is a flexible approach for the management of complex systems as policies make context-sensitive and automated decisions. For the effective development of policies it is desired to specify policies at a high level of abstraction initially, and to refine them until they are represented in a machine-executable way. We present an approach for the specification and the automated refinement of domainspecific event-condition-action (ECA) policies. Domain-specific policies use domain-specific concepts within their event, condition, and action parts. The approach is generic as it can be applied to any domain and supports a flexible number of abstraction layers. It is applied to the network management domain and demonstrated with policies for signal quality management in a mobile network.