IUPC: Identification and Unification of Process Constraints

Business Process Compliance (BPC) has gained significant momentum in research and practice during the last years. Although many approaches address BPC, they mostly assume the existence of some kind of unified base of process constraints and focus on their verification over the business processes. However, it remains unclear how such an inte- grated process constraint base can be built up, even though this con- stitutes the essential prerequisite for all further compliance checks. In addition, the heterogeneity of process constraints has been neglected so far. Without identification and separation of process constraints from domain rules as well as unification of process constraints, the success- ful IT support of BPC will not be possible. In this technical report we introduce a unified representation framework that enables the identifica- tion of process constraints from domain rules and their later unification within a process constraint base. Separating process constraints from domain rules can lead to significant reduction of compliance checking effort. Unification enables consistency checks and optimizations as well as maintenance and evolution of the constraint base on the other side.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, technical repor

Towards a comprehensive design-time compliance management:A roadmap

Today’s business climate demands business processes to meet many compliance regulations that require all enterprises to review their processes and ensure that they satisfy the set of relevant compliance requirements. Compliance management should be considered from the very early stages of business process design, thus achieving compliance by design. In this paper, we give a brief overview of an approach for managing business process compliance during design-time phase of business process lifecycle. We also discuss the roadmap for the key components and their relationship for a comprehensive design-time compliance support

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

Applying Activity Patterns for Developing an Intelligent Process Modeling Tool

Due to their high level of abstraction and their reusability, workflow patterns are increasingly attracting the interest of both BPM researchers and BPM tool vendors. Frequently, process models can be assembled out of a set of recurrent business functions (e.g., task execution request, approval, notification), each of them having generic semantics that can be described as activity pattern. To our best knowledge, so far, there has been no extensive work implementing such activity patterns in a process modeling tool. In this paper we present an approach for modeling business processes and workflows. It is based on a suite which, when being implemented in a process modeling tool, allows to design business processes based on well-defined (process) activity patterns. Our suite further provides support for analysing and verifying certain properties of the composed process models (e.g., absence of deadlocks and livelocks). Finally, our approach considers both business processes designed from scratch and processes extracted from legacy systems

HOW TO INFORM THE POINT OF SINGLE CONTACT? – A BUSINESS PROCESS BASED APPROACH

The EU-Service-Directive will lead to big challenges for public administrations. The administrations have to offer a point of single contact supporting the customer. This point of single contacts needs an overview of the administrational processes to perform his task. As processes from different organizations and organizational units are relevant for the EU-Service-Directive they can only be captured by using a distributed approach. The contribution of this paper is to present a domain specific distributed modeling method which allows a fast, efficient, and consistent capturing of the information needed for the point of single contact.

Towards Compliance of Cross-Organizational Processes and their Changes

Businesses require the ability to rapidly implement new processes and to quickly adapt existing ones to environmental changes including the optimization of their interactions with partners and customers. However, changes of either intra- or cross-organizational processes must not be done in an uncontrolled manner. In particular, processes are increasingly subject to compliance rules that usually stem from security constraints, corporate guidelines, standards, and laws. These compliance rules have to be considered when modeling business processes and changing existing ones. While change and compliance have been extensively discussed for intra-organizational business processes, albeit only in an isolated manner, their combination in the context of cross-organizational processes remains an open issue. In this paper, we discuss requirements and challenges to be tackled in order to ensure that changes of cross-organizational business processes preserve compliance with imposed regulations, standards and laws