Knowedge-based Policy Conflict Analysis for Collabrative Workspace

In collaborative workspace, collaborations are constrained by different requirements between different participants. Since policy-based management can be used to simplify collaboration management, administrators and users can use policies to define control rules and configurations of collaborative workspaces. These control rules and restrictions actually reflect management needs and business contracts. When collaboration is necessary between participants for a specific task, various management requirements from individuals may have conflicts. The situation is even worse when the collaboration is a one-time event. To detect and resolve potential conflicts within a collaborative workspace, a knowledge-based agent framework is proposed and used in this paper to analyze potential policy conflicts. Experiments in a sensor network environment confirm several advantages of the proposed framework.