A management policies framework

Policies are one aspect of administrative information which make an important impact on management objects (physical and logical resources, users...) within the administration of a system. Indeed they determine the management task to be performed upon managed objects in order to achieve management goals. The issue of managing telecommunication and computer networks through policies has not been considered by standardisation or by most of researches on the management of networks and distributed systems. In this paper, we present a policy framework for a policy driven management architecture. It includes an object oriented informational model for the representation of management policies; a functional model for the manipulation of policies and a communication model which describes different interfaces and interactions of the policy framework with the management environment.