Automating conventional compliance audit procxsesses

Abstract

Any product, especially those with safety features or concerns, is normally subject to compliance audit with various standards and legal requirements at different stages throughout its lifecycle. These requirements are typically conveyed in voluminous written natural language texts requiring much expert interpretation. The compliance audit process has conventionally been a manual undertaking, which is known to be laborious, costly, and error-prone. In an era of increased legislation and electronic representations of products, it is prudent that some of these manual processes should be automated. This paper describes the capabilities of an automated compliance audit framework that can be incorporated into the compliance management of a product lifecycle. Apart from the product data model that is subject to audit, essential components of the framework include machine-readable legal knowledge and executable audit process models, support for supplementary human input and interface with simulation tools.