Dynamic policy conflict analysis for collaborative web services

Policy-based management can simplify web service management by establishing policies to control various activities involved in service governance and provision. Administrators and users use policies to define control rules and restrictions, and to configure application environments. When collaboration is necessary between web services for a specific task, various management requirements from individual services may have conflicts. Some conflicts are static. Some conflicts are dynamic, which are difficult to detect and resolve. The situation is even worse when the collaboration is a one-time event. To detect and resolve potential dynamic conflicts between web services in a collaborative setting, especially between web services from different administrative domains, a semantic temporal logic is proposed and used in this paper to analyze dynamic policy conflicts. An implementation and resultant experiments are also discussed.