A policy based role object model

Enterprise roles define the duties and responsibilities of the individuals which are assigned to them. This paper introduces a framework for the management of large distributed systems which makes use of the concepts developed in role theory. Our concept of a role groups the specifications of management policies which define the rights and duties corresponding to that role. Individuals may then be assigned to or withdrawn from a role, to enable rapid and flexible organisational change, without altering the specification of the policies. We extend this role concept to include relationships as means of specifying required interactions, duties and rights between related roles. Organisations may contain large numbers of similar roles with multiple relationships between them, so there is a need for reuse of specifications. Role and relationship classes permit multiple instantiation and inheritance used for incremental extension of the organisational structure with minimal specification effort. We also briefly examine consistency and auditing issues related to this role framework.