An Approach to Role Based Management for Distributed Systems

Roles have been widely used for modelling the authority, responsibility, functions and interactions associated with manager positions within organisations. In this paper we discuss the issues related to specifying roles for both human and automated managers of distributed computer systems. The starting point is that a role can be defined in terms of the authorisation and obligation policies for a particular manager position which specify what actions the manager is permitted or is obliged to do on a set of target objects. This permits inidviduals to be assigned or removed from postions without respecifying the policies for the role. However these policies are insufficient for specifying the interaction protocols between managers and the targets they manage or between different manager roles. There is a need to specify the coordination and synchronisation relating to manager interactions. This report describes notations and techniques applicable to specifying the interactions and activi..