Evaluating Compliance State Visualizations for Multiple Process Models and Instances

Abstract

Business process compliance refers to the formalization, enactment, verification, and monitoring of constraints for one or multiple process models and one or multiple process instances. Such complex compliance scenarios crave for visualization support that fosters traceability and understandability during design and runtime. It must be clear, for example, which processes and process instances are subject to which compliance constraint and, especially during runtime, which compliance state (e.g., satisfied or violated) is active. This paper analyzes existing visualization approaches for compliance-related information and demonstrates their usability and feasibility through a prototypical implementation and the application to a logistics scenario. The focus is on constraints that span across multiple processes and process instances. The preferred visualizations are then implemented in a real-world process scenario from the manufacturing domain and evaluated through in-depth interviews with three stakeholders. The interviews narrow down the results of the technical evaluation, indicating that Color is best suited for obtaining a quick overview and Text for in-detail analysis of compliance states.