Provisions and obligations in policy rule management

Policies in modern systems and applications play an essential role. We argue that decisions based on policy rules should take into account the possibility for the users to enable specific policy rules, by performing actions at the time when decisions are being rendered, and/or by promising to perform other actions in the future. Decisions should also consider preferences among different sets of actions enabling different rules. We adopt a formalism and mechanism devised for policy rule management in this context, and investigate in detail the notion of obligations, which are those actions users promise to perform in the future upon firing of a specific policy rule. We also investigate how obligations can be monitored and how the policy rules should be affected when obligations are either fulfilled or defaulted.