An Anti-Pattern-based Runtime Business Process Compliance Monitoring Framework

Abstract

Today's dynamically changing business and com-pliance environment demand enterprises to continuously ensure their compliance with various laws, regulations and standards. Several business studies have concluded that compliance man-agement is one of the main challenges companies face nowadays. Runtime compliance monitoring is of utmost importance for compliance assurance as during the prior design-time compli-ance checking phase, only a subset of the imposed compliance requirements can be statically checked due to the absence of required variable instantiation and contextual information. Furthermore, the fact that a BP model has been statically checked for compliance during design-time does not guarantee that the corresponding running BP instances are usually compliant due to human and machine errors. In this paper, we present a generic proactive runtime BP compliance monitoring framework, BP-MaaS. The framework incorporates a wide range of expressive high-level graphical compliance patterns for the abstract specifi-cation of runtime constraints. Compliance monitoring is achieved using anti-patterns, a novel mechanism which is agnostic towards any underlying monitoring execution technology. As a proof-of-concept, complex event processing (CEP) technology is adopted as one of the possible realizations of the monitoring engine of the framework. An integrated tool-suite has been developed as an instantiation artifact of BP-MaaS, and the validation of the approach is undertaken in several directions, which includes internal validity and case study conducts considering two real-life case studies from the banking domain.