A declarative reasoning approach to conflict management in Intent-Based Networking

Intent-Based Networking aims to automate network management by allowing users to express desired outcomes rather than manually configuring network resources. For its fulfilment, a user intent should be translated into machine-executable actions, which are then implemented in the infras-tructure, and their outcome continuously monitored. However, such an automated loop may be hindered by conflicts that arise within an intent or between multiple intents throughout their lifecycle. In this work, we propose a Prolog-based declarative model and reasoning methodology to detect and resolve conflicts arising from new incoming intents. By leveraging and extending an open-source Prolog prototype designed for intent processing and translation into Virtual Network Function chains, we show its conflict detection and resolution capabilities through an illustrative application use case.