A Declarative Approach to Automated Configuration

Authors:

John A. Hewson and Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh; Andrew D. Gordon, Microsoft Research and University of Edinburgh

Abstract:

System administrators increasingly use declarative, object-oriented languages to configure their systems. Extending such systems with automated analysis and decision making is an area of active research. We introduce ConfSolve, an object-oriented declarative configuration language, in which logical constraints over a system can be specified. Verification, impact analysis or even the generation of valid configurations can then be performed, by translation to a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), which is solved with an off-the-shelf solver. We present a full definition of our language and its compilation process, and show that our implementation outperforms previous work utilising an SMT solver, while adding new features such as optimisation.

John A. Hewson, University of Edinburgh

Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh

Andrew D. Gordon, Microsoft Research and University of Edinburgh

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