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 Framework for Visually Monitoring Business Process Compliance (Extended Abstract)

Any enterprise must ensure that its business processes comply with imposed compliance rules. This extended abstract presents 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 for the detection of violations, but additionally highlights their causes. Finally, the framework assists users in both monitoring business process compliance and ensuring the compliant continuation of running business processes. Overall, the framework provides a fundamental contribution towards the real-time monitoring of compliance in process-driven enterprises

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

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

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

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

An Architecture for Integrated Intelligence in Urban Management using Cloud Computing

With the emergence of new methodologies and technologies it has now become possible to manage large amounts of environmental sensing data and apply new integrated computing models to acquire information intelligence. This paper advocates the application of cloud capacity to support the information, communication and decision making needs of a wide variety of stakeholders in the complex business of the management of urban and regional development. The complexity lies in the interactions and impacts embodied in the concept of the urban-ecosystem at various governance levels. This highlights the need for more effective integrated environmental management systems. This paper offers a user-orientated approach based on requirements for an effective management of the urban-ecosystem and the potential contributions that can be supported by the cloud computing community. Furthermore, the commonality of the influence of the drivers of change at the urban level offers the opportunity for the cloud computing community to develop generic solutions that can serve the needs of hundreds of cities from Europe and indeed globally.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Case study based approach to integration of sustainable design analysis, performance and building information modelling

This paper presents a case study based research of both the method and technology for integration of sustainable design analysis (SDA) and building information modelling (BIM) within smart built environments (SBE). Level 3 BIM federation and integration challenges are recognised and improvements suggested, including issues with combining geometry and managing attribute data. The research defines SDA as rapid and quantifiable analysis of diverse sustainable alternatives and ‘what if’ scenarios posed by a design team and client during the early stages of the project, where the benefits of correct decisions can significantly exceed the actual investment required. The SDA concept and BIM integration findings are explained through a convergence from conceptualisation to calculation stages, emphasising the importance of an iterative over a linear approach. The approach allowed for a multitude of “what if” scenarios to be analysed, leading to more informed sustainable solutions at the right stages of the project development, with a generally lower level of detail (LOD) and computational/modelling effort required. In addition, the final stage of Building Regulations Part L compliance calculations was reached with a lot greater level of certainty, in terms of its requirements. Finally, a strategy for long term performance monitoring and evaluation of the building design in terms of its environmental sustainability is presented, via integration between BIM and SBE (Smart Built Environment) technologies

Diagnosis and the management constituency of small-scale fisheries

Diagnosis and adaptive management can help improve the ability of small-scale fisheries (SSF) in the developing world to better cope with and adapt to both external drivers and internal sources of uncertainty. This paper presents a framework for diagnosis and adaptive management and discusses ways of implementing the first two phases of learning: diagnosis and mobilising an appropriate management constituency. The discussion addresses key issues and suggests suitable approaches and tools as well as numerous sources of further information. Diagnosis of a SSF defines the system to be managed, outlines the scope of the management problem in terms of threats and opportunities, and aims to construct realistic and desired future projections for the fishery. These steps can clarify objectives and lead to development of indicators necessary for adaptive management. Before management, however, it is important to mobilize a management constituency to enact change. Ways of identifying stakeholders and understanding both enabling and obstructive interactions and management structures are outlined. These preliminary learning phases for adaptive SSF management are expected to work best if legitimised by collaborative discussion among fishery stakeholders drawing on multiple knowledge systems and participatory approaches to assessment. (PDF contains 33 pages

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