US Patent 11444833 Business policy management for self-driving network

A controller device manages a plurality of network devices. The controller device includes one or more processing units configured to receive an indication of a stateful intent, the data structure including a plurality of nodes and a plurality of edges, each node of the plurality of nodes being representative of a respective network device of the plurality of network devices. The one or more processing units are configured to determine, using an abstract function configured at a node of the plurality of nodes, a stateless intent for implementing the stateful intent and generate low level configuration data for the plurality of network devices based on the stateless intent. The one or more processing units are configured to interface with one or more of the plurality of network devices to configure the one or more of the plurality of network devices with the low level configuration data.