Runtime self-monitoring approach of business process compliance in cloud environments

Abstract

Recently, several industrial studies have concluded that compliance management is one of the major challenges companies face nowadays. In practice, runtime compliance monitoring is of utmost importance for compliance assurance as during the design-time compliance 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 business process model has been statically checked for compliance during design-time does not guarantee that the corresponding running business process instances are usually compliant due to human and machine errors. The problem of runtime monitoring of business process compliance becomes more challenging when business processes are executed in cloud computing environments. In this context, the compliance process can not rely on external components as the whole execution environment is mainly controlled by the cloud providers. In this article, we propose a novel approach to tackle this problem by adopting and configuring the business process models into a form that augment the associated compliance rules so that they can be monitored without the need to rely on external monitoring components. Compared to approaches that depend on an external monitoring component, our approach requires less sophisticated infrastructure when hosted on the cloud as well as less traffic footprint as communication with an external component for monitoring is no longer needed.