Multi agents simulation of justice trials to support control management and reduction of civil trials duration

Abstract

Thanks to the digitalization of Civil Legal Processes that has been carried out in Italy since 2005, a consistent flow of data has been generated regarding all phases of Civil Trials. The Italian Ministry of Justice has recognized the opportunity to better assess the quality of Courts’ management, seeking ways to implement Decision Support Systems to aid the work of Court Presidents. In collaboration with the Court of Livorno, which has provided data and case studies, KPIs and indicators have been developed, and have been later used within an Agent-based simulation framework to assess the behaviour of Chancellors and Judges in response to Court Presidents’ decisions, and in particular to verify the effects of such decision on Processes’ duration. This paper presents the Agent-based simulation approaches adopted to predict the effects of Presidents’ decisions, by taking in consideration the behaviour of Chancellors and Judges, derived from the examination of past Trials, whose aspects have been recorded by the Court’s digital system.

Improving the analysis of the judiciary performance - the use of data mining techniques to assess the timeliness of civil trials

“…The utilisation of data mining techniques to analyse business processes, using event data extracted from information systems, has become an essential and well-known business intelligence and business process management toolset, but the application of process mining techniques to the judicial field is a relatively new topic. In fact, readers can find in the law and economics literature studies on the analysis of court performance using data mining approaches (Visaria, 2009;Di Martino et al, 2021;Tullock, 1980). Models extracted from analysed logs can be either used to assess the correctness of the process itself, by applying specific check rules, or to maintain and eventually enhance it.…”

“…Several reasons explain this interest, which has gone beyond the specific legal disciplines to involve public policy, management, economics and ICT studies. Originality/value -Considering the literature on the judiciary (Visser et al, 2019;Di Martino et al, 2021;Troisi and Alfano, 2023) the contribution differs as both the methodological approach and the predictive analysis considers the intrinsic differences that define cases belonging to different juridical matters performing a cross-sectional analysis, with a specific focus of process variants.…”