Syntax and Semantics for Business Rules

Abstract. Business processes are increasingly being expressed in declarative terms, as business rules which express obligations concerning conduct, action, practice or procedure regarding a particular business activity or sphere of operation. However, the leading standard for business rules, Semantics for Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR), leaves certain decisions concerning the precise syntax and semantics of business rules unspecified, for example, the scope and nesting of modalities and first order quantifiers, and the precise semantics of alethic and deontic modalities. In this paper, we propose a precise syntax and semantics for SBVR and present some complexity results for business rules with the proposed syntax and semantics.