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

Visual Modeling of Business Process Compliance Rules with the Support of Multiple Perspectives

A fundamental challenge for any process-aware information system is to ensure compliance of modeled and executed business processes with imposed compliance rules stemming from guidelines, standards and laws. Such compliance rules usually refer to multiple process perspectives including control flow, time, resources, data, and interactions with business partners. On one hand, compliance rules should be comprehensible for domain experts who must define and apply them. On the other, they should have a precise semantics such that they can be automatically processed. In this context, providing a visual compliance rule language seems promising as it allows hiding formal details and offers an intuitive way of modeling. So far, visual compliance rule languages have focused on the control flow perspective, but lack adequate support for the other perspectives. To remedy this drawback, this paper provides an approach that extends visual compliance rule languages with the ability to consider data, time, resources, and partner interactions when modeling business process compliance rules. Overall, this extension will foster business process compliance support in practice

On the Formal Semantics of the Extended Compliance Rule Graph

A fundamental challenge for any process-aware information system is to ensure compliance of modeled and executed business processes with imposed compliance rules stemming from guidelines, standards and laws. Such compliance rules usually refer to multiple process perspectives including control flow, data, time, and resources as well as interactions with business partners. On one hand, compliance rules should be comprehensible for domain experts who must define and apply them. On the other, compliance rules should have precise semantics such that they can be automatically processed. In this context, providing a visual compliance rule language, which hides formal details from rule designers, is crucial in order to enable an intuitive way of modeling. So far, visual compliance rule languages have focused on the control flow perspective, but lack adequate support for the other perspectives. To remedy this drawback, this report introduces the extended Compliance Rule Graph language and its formal semantics

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

A Visual Language for Modeling Business Process Compliance Rules

A fundamental challenge for enterprises is to ensure compliance of their business processes with imposed compliance rules stemming from various sources, e.g., corporate guidelines, best practices, standards, and laws. In general, a compliance rule may refer to multiple process perspectives including control flow, time, data, resources, and interactions with business partners. On one hand, compliance rules should be comprehensible for domain experts who must define, verify and apply them. On the other, these rules should have a precise semantics to avoid ambiguities and enable their automated processing. Providing a visual language is advantageous in this context as it allows hiding formal details and offering an intuitive way of modeling the compliance rules. However, existing visual languages for compliance rule modeling have focused on the control flow perspective so far, but lack proper support for the other process perspectives. To remedy this drawback, this paper introduces the extended Compliance Rule Graph language, which enables the visual modeling of compliance rules with the support of multiple perspectives. Overall, this language will foster the modeling and verification of compliance rules in practice

Towards Visually Monitoring Multiple Perspectives of Business Process Compliance

A challenge for enterprises is to ensure conformance of their 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 in process modeling, visual languages for specifying compliance rules have been proposed. However, business process compliance cannot be completely decided at design time, but needs to be monitored during run time as well. This paper introduces an approach for visually monitoring business process compliance. In particular, this approach covers all relevant process perspectives. Furthermore, compliance violations cannot only be detected, but also be visually highlighted emphasizing their causes. Finally, the approach assists users in ensuring compliant continuations of a running business process

A Visual Language for Modeling Multiple Perspectives of Business Process Compliance Rules (Extended Abstract)

A fundamental challenge for enterprises is to ensure compliance of their business processes with imposed compliance rules stemming from various sources, e.g., corporate guidelines, best practices, standards, and laws. In general, a compliance rule may refer to multiple process perspectives including control flow, time, data, resources, and interactions with business partners. On one hand, compliance rules should be comprehensible for domain experts who must define, verify and apply them. On the other, these rules should have a precise semantics to avoid ambiguities and enable their automated processing. Providing a visual language is advantageous in this context as it allows hiding formal details and offering an intuitive way of modeling the compliance rules. However, existing visual languages for compliance rule modeling have focused on the control flow perspective so far, but lack proper support for the other process perspectives. To remedy this drawback, we introduce the extended Compliance Rule Graph language, which enables the visual modeling of compliance rules with the support of multiple perspectives. Overall, this language will foster the modeling and verification of compliance rules in practice

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