US Patent 7908349 Resource management with rule based consistency check

A mechanism is provided for implementing an adaptive model. The mechanism allows an authority to define a desired target state of several kinds of resources, which are directly controlled by different subjects. The authority publishes a series of rules in a shared repository; each rule indicates the target state of a resource for a corresponding logic or physic category of the subjects. Each subject retrieves the rules corresponding to its logic category from the shared repository. The rules are then applied by the subject; as a result, the physic category of the subject is updated. The subject now retrieves and applies the rules corresponding to its physic category. In this way, different dependency schemes may be implemented without any explicit definition in the rules.