Diagnostic information for compliance checking of temporal compliance requirements

Abstract

Compliance checking is gaining importance as today's organizations need to show that operational processes are executed in a controlled manner while satisfying predefined (legal) requirements or service level agreements. Deviations may be costly and expose an organization to severe risks. Compliance checking is of growing importance for the business process management and auditing communities. This paper presents an approach for checking compliance of observed process executions recorded in an event log to temporal compliance requirements, which restrict when particular activities may or may not occur. We show how temporal compliance requirements discussed in literature can be unified and formalized using a generic temporal compliance rule. To check compliance with respect to a temporal rule, the event log describing the observed behavior is aligned with the rule. The alignment then shows which events occurred out of order and which events deviated by which amount of time from the prescribed behavior. This approach integrates with an existing approach for control-flow compliance checking, allowing for multi-perspective diagnostic information in case of compliance violations. We show the feasibility of our technique by checking temporal compliance rules of real life event logs. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.