A pervasive system features a plethora of devices, services and applications organized as a large distributed system. One approach to managing such systems is by policies where administrators specify the management action to be taken in different situations using Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules. An important problem with policy-based management of a pervasive system is that multiple rules can get triggered on a single event and the behavior of the system depends on the order of rule

more »

... er of rule enforcement. Systems managed using ECA policies do not provide guarantees about system behavior when multiple rules are concurrently triggered. In this paper, we present a novel rule framework called Event-Condition-Precondition-Action-Postcondition (ECPAP) that combines axiomatic specifications with ECA rules for specifying management rules. ECPAP rules contain action specifications in first-order predicate logic that enables us to reason about the enforcement order. We define a notion called enforcement semantics for policy-based management and show how this can be used to provide guarantees about system behavior. We present the details of the framework.