Obligation monitoring in policy management

Policies are widely used in modern systems and applications. Recently, it has been recognized that simple decisions are just not enough for many systems and applications. Many policies require actions to be performed after a decision is made in accordance with the policy. To address this need, this paper studies the notion of obligations, which are those conditions or actions that must be fulfilled by either the users or the system after the decision. This paper formalizes the obligations and investigates mechanisms for monitoring obligations. In particular, the paper discusses various aspects of how the system may compensate for unfulfilled obligations.