Visually Monitoring Multiple Perspectives of Business Process Compliance

A challenge for any enterprise is to ensure conformance of its business processes with imposed compliance rules. The latter may constrain multiple perspectives of a business process, including control flow, data, time, resources, and interactions with business partners. However, business process compliance cannot completely be decided at design time, but needs to be monitored during run time as well. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for visually monitoring business process compliance. As opposed to existing approaches, the framework supports the visual monitoring of all relevant process perspectives based on the extended Compliance Rule Graph (eCRG) language. Furthermore, it not only allows detecting compliance violations, but visually highlights their causes as well. Finally, the framework assists users in monitoring business process compliance and ensuring a compliant continuation of their running business processes

Towards Multi-perspective Conformance Checking with Fuzzy Sets

Nowadays organizations often need to employ data-driven techniques to audit their business processes and ensure they comply with laws and internal/external regulations. Failing in complying with the expected process behavior can indeed pave the way to inefficiencies or, worse, to frauds or abuses. An increasingly popular approach to automatically assess the compliance of the executions of organization processes is represented by alignment-based conformance checking. These techniques are able to compare real process executions with models representing the expected behaviors, providing diagnostics able to pinpoint possible discrepancies. However, the diagnostics generated by state of the art techniques still suffer from some limitations. They perform a crisp evaluation of process compliance, marking process behavior either as compliant or deviant, without taking into account the severity of the identified deviation. This hampers the accuracy of the obtained diagnostics and can lead to misleading results, especially in contexts where there is some tolerance with respect to violations of the process guidelines. In the present work, we discuss the impact and the drawbacks of a crisp deviation assessment approach. Then, we propose a novel conformance checking approach aimed at representing actors’ tolerance with respect to process deviations, taking it into account when assessing the severity of the deviations. As a proof of concept, we performed a set of synthetic experiments to assess the approach. The obtained results point out the potential of the usage of a more flexible evaluation of process deviations, and its impact on the quality and the interpretation of the obtained diagnostics

An Operational Semantics for the Extended Compliance Rule Graph Language

A challenge for any enterprise is to ensure conformance of its business processes with imposed compliance rules. Usually, the latter may constrain multiple perspectives of a business process, including control flow, data, time, resources, and interactions with business partners. Like for process modeling, intuitive visual languages have been proposed for specifying compliance rules. However, business process compliance cannot completely be decided at design time, but needs to be monitored during run time as well. In previous work we introduced the extended Compliance Rule Graph (eCRG) language that enables the visual monitoring of business process compliance regarding the control flow, data, time, and resource perspectives as well as the interactions a process has with business partners. This technical report introduces an operational semantics of the eCRG language. In particular, the state of a visual compliance rule is reflected through markings and annotations of an eCRG. The proposed operational semantics not only allows detecting compliance violations at run-time, but visually highlights their causes as well. Finally, it allows providing recommendations to users in order to proactively ensure for a compliant continuation of a running business process

Enabling Multi-Perspective Business Process Compliance

A particular challenge for any enterprise is to ensure that its business processes conform with compliance rules, i.e., semantic constraints on the multiple perspectives of the business processes. Compliance rules stem, for example, from legal regulations, corporate best practices, domain-specific guidelines, and industrial standards. In general, compliance rules are multi-perspective, i.e., they not only restrict the process behavior (i.e. control flow), but may refer to other process perspectives (e.g. time, data, and resources) and the interactions (i.e. message exchanges) of a business process with other processes as well. The aim of this thesis is to improve the specification and verification of multi-perspective process compliance based on three contributions: 1. The extended Compliance Rule Graph (eCRG) language, which enables the visual modeling of multi-perspective compliance rules. Besides control flow, the latter may refer to the time, data, resource, and interaction perspectives of a business process. 2. A framework for multi-perspective monitoring of the compliance of running processes with a given set of eCRG compliance rules. 3. Techniques for verifying business process compliance with respect to the interaction perspective. In particular, we consider compliance verification for cross-organizational business processes, for which solely incomplete process knowledge is available. All contributions were thoroughly evaluated through proof-of-concept prototypes, case studies, empirical studies, and systematic comparisons with related works

Fuzzy Conformance Checking of Observed Behaviour with Expectations

In some different research fields a research issue has been to establish if the external, observed behaviour of an entity is conformant to some rules/specifications/expectations. Research areas like Multi Agent Systems, Business Process, and Legal/Normative systems, have proposed different characterizations of the same problem, named as the conformance problem. Most of the available systems, however, provide only simple yes/no answers to the conformance issue. In this paper we introduce the idea of a gradual conformance, expressed in fuzzy terms. To this end, we present a system based on a fuzzy extension of Drools, and exploit it to perform conformance tests. In particular, we consider two aspects: the first related to fuzzy ontological aspects, and the second about fuzzy time-related aspects. Moreover, we discuss how to conjugate the fuzzy contributions from these aspects to get a single, fuzzy score representing a conformance degree