Michael Fellmann and Matthias Weidlich, eds.: Proceedings of EMISA 2017,
Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI), Gesellschaft f¨
ur Informatik, Bonn 2017 11
A Framework for Visually Monitoring Business Process
Compliance (Extended Abstract)
David Knuplesch1und Manfred Reichert1und Akhil Kumar2
Abstract: Any enterprise must ensure that its business processes comply with imposed compliance
rules. This extended abstract presents a comprehensive framework for visually monitoring busi-
ness process compliance. As opposed to existing approaches, the framework supports the visu-
al monitoring of all relevant process perspectives based on the extended Compliance Rule Graph
(eCRG) language. Furthermore, it not only allows for the detection of violations, but additional-
ly highlights their causes. Finally, the framework assists users in both monitoring business process
compliance and ensuring the compliant continuation of running business processes. Overall, the
framework provides a fundamental contribution towards the real-time monitoring of compliance in
process-driven enterprises. The work summarized in this extended abstract has been published in
[KRK15a, KRK15b, KRK17].
Keywords: business process compliance, compliance monitoring, visual business analytics
Enterprise must ensure that their business processes comply with imposed compliance
rules. Usually, respective rules reflect domain-specific requirements that refer to, for ex-
ample, corporate guidelines, standards, best practices, and legal regulations [GS09]. In ge-
neral, compliance rules may refer to various perspectives of business processes, including
process behavior (i.e. control flow), data, time, resources, and interactions with business
partners [CRRC10, Tu12]. However, business process compliance can be ensured in dif-
ferent phases of the process life cycle [LRD08]. In particular, ensuring compliance during
process enactment is covered by compliance monitoring approaches. The latter observe
the events of running business processes (e.g., start and completion of activities) in order
to detect run-time violations of compliance rules as well as to notify users accordingly.
10 fundamental compliance monitoring functionalities (CMFs) were presented in [Ly15].
Some of them demand support for the time, data and resource perspectives of business
processes, whereas some other CMFs address event correlation, multiple activations of
compliance rules, and root cause analysis for compliance violations. However, [Ly15] fi-
nally concludes that the combination of an expressive language with full traceability has
not been well understood yet as existing approaches only partially support the CMFs.
In [KRK17], we present a comprehensive framework for visually monitoring business pro-
cess that supports all 10 CMFs and is based on earlier work [KRK15a, KRK15b, Ly11].
The framework utilizes the extended Compliance Rule Graph (eCRG) language [KR16]
1Ulm University, Institute of Database and Information Systems,
James-Franck-Ring, 89081 Ulm, Germany,
{david.knuplesch,manfred.reichert}@uni-ulm.de
2Pennsylvania State University
Smeal College of Business, University Park, PA 16802, USA,
for the visual and formal specification of compliance rules with support for multiple pro-
cess perspectives (i.e., control flow, data, time, resources, and interactions with business
partners). [KRK17] annotates the various elements of an eCRG with texts, colors and
symbols when processing the events of an event stream. These visual markings not only
constitute a suitable basis for deriving the state of a particular compliance rule, but also
for highlighting the causes of observed compliance violations. The markings are further
used to specify and measure compliance metrics as well as to enable the recommendation
of the tasks to be performed such that compliance can be ensured.
Altogether, the framework presented in [KRK17] not only meets the compliance monito-
ring functionalities (CMFs) introduced in [Ly15], but complements them with additional
features (e.g., interactions with business partners). At the core of the framework is a vi-
sual language, which we denote as extended Compliance Rule Graph (eCRG). The eCRG
language is not only used to specify compliance rules, but further utilized to realize visual
compliance monitoring. Note that the latter involves proper user feedback as well.
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