An efficient business process compliance checking approach

Abstract

Assuring compliant business processes is an important task of business process management, which is commonly supported by the use of business process models. As every compliance rule corresponds with a typical structure, the detection of those corresponds to a pattern matching problem.More specifically, we encounter the problem of subgraph isomorphism. In this paper we propose an automatic business process compliance checking approach that relies on a subgraph isomorphism algorithm and that is suitable for process models in general. As common subgraph isomorphism is a problem that can only be solved in exponential time, we use an algorithm that simplifies the problem through pre-processing. This makes the isomorphism solvable in polynomial time. With the approach, we aim at supporting decision makers in business process compliance management.