Multi-Agent Oriented Policy Representation Specification And Policy Conflict

Development of virtual organizations asks network and distributed system for more open and diverse resources,current agent technology just meets the needs of the development of virtual organizations.Agent's characteristics of autonomy and society can provide flexible services and resources.However, Uncontrollability of agent proposes challenges to the application of agent technology in virtual organizations,in order to solve the problem,researchers in the field of agent take policy mechanism to control actions of agents.The nature of policy is a kind of description to control of agent's action.Policy is a set of concepts,which is defined as "strategy" in the areas of security control and routing management, influences actions of agents in a way of "driven".Policy is defined as "norm" in multi-agent system behavior theory, which coordinates actions of agents in a multi-agent system in a way of "governed". The policy in a strategy-driven system has mature representation specification and application, which is focused on concrete behaviors of an agent,however, not well applied in multi-agent systems.Norm provides a good idea to control and coordinate actions of agents, but "norm-governed" in multi-agent systems just is a mechanism to control actions of agents, which tries to use policy to coordinate the whole actions in multi-agent systems,it is short of guiding concrete actions of intelligent individual,and does not study the representation specification of policy from the view of applications.In order to solve those problems of multi-agent systems applications in the virtual organization, this paper combines the advantages of "strategy-driven" and "norm-governed",proposes new policy representation specification:two-dimensional multi-layer policy, which describes policy mechanism in a way of layer from dimensions of application and abstract.Two-dimensional multi-layer policy gives ten different types of policy in order to control and coordinate actions of agents.Such a policy specification not only builds the coordination services and the mapping of "microâ†'macro behavior", but also gives a detailed specification.Researchers on policy defined contradiction between polices as policy conflict. Policy conflict will lead agents into a dilemma status.No matter how agents act, they will violate a policy at least. The current research on policy conflict is mainly based on strategy, moreover, which has some shortcomings,because of lack of considering conditions of policies,which leads to the misjudgments.This article will overcome the shortcoming, propose a detailed and practical algorithm which considers conditions of policies and is based on our new policy representation specification.This paper makes analysis and design of policy management tool finally, implements experimental version of policy management tool in order to verify our theoretical study.