Dynamic policies through context-sensitive

situations

Opher Etzion

IBM Research Laboratory in Haifa

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 .

Key Concepts

Context

Situation

Action

Policy

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

Situation

• A trigger for reaction

• A (possible uncertain) predicate over the history of events. Examples– Amazon’s 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.

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.

Policy

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

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.

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.

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.