Under this paradigm, an administrator can manage different aspects of a network or distributed system in a flexible and simplified manner by deploying a set of policies that govern its behaviour.
[4][5] Policies are technology independent rules aiming to enhance the hard-coded functionality of managed devices by introducing interpreted logic that can be dynamically changed without modifying the underlying implementation.
Resulting policies are stored in a repository in a form that must correspond to an information model[8] so as to ensure interoperability across products from different vendors.
They have also been described as being analogous to software bugs[10] that occur when two or more policies are activated simultaneously enforcing contradictory management operations on the system.
For example, conflicts can occur between policies for dynamically allocating resources and those setting quotas for users or classes of service.
Based on the types of conflicts identified in the literature and the different application domains in which they occur, research has concentrated in the development of mechanisms and techniques for their effective detection.
Although human intervention is unavoidable in some situations, several research efforts focussed on techniques to automate the resolution process where possible.
[9][19] Lack of automation in the handling of run-time conflicts may have catastrophic consequences on the correct system operation, especially when managing QoS for delay sensitive applications.
While the high-level goals reflect the business objectives of the network administrator, the low-level policies are responsible for device-level configurations.