Controlling access to physical locations

The need to secure and control access to rooms in premises has shifted from allowing some people to enter a room to giving permission to specific persons to access a room and recording who entered the room and the time they spent in it. With such need for higher security in mind, we design an access control system for controlling physical access of people to locations or to specific units in these locations. Our study gives emphasis to the organization of physical locations, including nested rooms, and the approach used to assign permission to people to access such locations. We also define some security policies to be used in such model as well as appropriate user interfaces. Finally, we develop two patterns based on our model.