An Ontology-Based Representation for Policy-Governed Adjustable Autonomy

Policies are a means to dynamically regulate the behavior of system components without changing code nor requiring the cooperation of the components being governed. By changing policies, a system can be continuously adjusted to accommodate variations in externally imposed constraints and environmental conditions. KAoS policy and domain services rely on an OWL ontology of the computational environment, application context, and the policies themselves that enables runtime extensibility and adaptability of the system, as well as the ability to analyze policies relating to entities described at different levels of abstraction. Besides the currently implemented conflict detection and resolution methods, we are developing an approach to determine how and when to make policy changes based on adjustable autonomy considerations. This approach relies heavily on the information contained in the KAoS Policy Ontologies