-- **Client Supervision**: Monitors clients (R-APPs) to eliminate stray policies in case of client failure.
-- **Consistency Monitoring**: Ensures the SMO view of policies and RIC capabilities is consistent with the actual situation in the RICs.
-- **Policy Configuration**:
- - Single REST API for all RICs in the network.
- - Query functions to find all policies in a RIC, all policies owned by a service (R-APP), all policies of a specific type, etc.
- - Maps O1 resources (ManagedElement) to the controlling RIC.
+The A1 Policy Management Service is a microservice which maintains a transient repository of:
+
+- All A1 policies instances in the network. Each policy is targeted to a near-RT-RIC instance and is owned by a 'service' (e.g., rApps or the NONRTRIC Dashboard).
+- All near-RT-RICs in the network.
+- All Policy types supported by each near-RT-RIC.
+
+The service provides :
+
+- Unified REST API for managing A1 Policies in all near-RT-RICs.
+- Compliant with O-RAN R1 specification for A1-Policy Management (R1-AP v5.0, with additional features & fixes)
+- Synchronized view of A1 Policy instances for each rAPP
+- Synchronized view of A1 Policy instances in each near-RT-RIC
+- Synchronized view of A1 Policy types supported by each near-RT-RIC
+- Lookup service to find the near-RT-RIC to control resources in the RAN as defined in O1 (e.g. which near-RT-RIC should be accessed to control a certain CU or DU, which in turn controls a certain cell).
+- Monitors all near-RT-RICs and maintains data consistency, e.g. recovery from near-RT-RIC restarts
+- Support for different Southbound APIs to the near-RT-RICs (different versions of the A1-P and other similar APIs).
+- HTTPS can be configured to use a supplied certificate/private key and to validate peers towards a list of trusted CAs/certs.
+- HTTP proxy support for tunneling HTTP/HTTPS connections.
+- Fine-grained access-control - with new optional callouts to an external auth function
+- Fine-grained monitoring metrics, logging & call tracing can be configured