SeaFlows Toolset – Compliance Verification Made Easy for Process-Aware Information Systems

Abstract

In the light of an increasing demand on business process compliance, the verification of process models against compliance rules has become essential in enterprise computing. The SeaFlows Toolset featured in this paper extends process-aware information systems with compliance checking functionality. It provides a user-friendly environment for modeling compliance rules using a graph-based formalism and for enriching process models with these rules. To address a multitude of verification settings, we provide two complementary compliance checking approaches: The structural compliance checking approach derives structural criteria from compliance rules and applies them to detect incompliance. The data-aware behavioral compliance checking approach addresses the state explosion problem that can occur when the data dimension is explored during compliance checking. It performs context-sensitive automatic abstraction to derive an abstract process model which is more compact with regard to the data dimension enabling more efficient compliance checking. Altogether, SeaFlows Toolset constitutes a comprehensive and extensible framework for compliance checking of process models.

Effective application of process improvement patterns to business processes

“…Organizational objectives reflect strategic goals an organization wants to achieve with respect to an application scenario. Examples of organizational objectives that apply to many scenarios include the effectiveness of process output, cost savings, or compliance with regulations [1,22]. Note that these examples can be used as 5 Extended conceptual framework a starting point to identify organizational objectives relevant to a particular application scenario.…”

“…This relates not only to process improvement projects, but also to other settings such as compliance management [22] or benchmarking [30]. However, we wish to stress that these issues pertain to commercially available tools in general.…”

“…PIM card 5), this functionality would be very useful to identify and prioritize process variants that should be restricted or eliminated. -Compliance rules modeling allows describing relevant regulations for business processes in a way sufficiently formalized to automatically check whether these regulations have been adhered to in a process enactment data sample [22,33]. As an example, consider the requirement of obtaining approval before job offers are issued.…”

Requirements towards Effective Process Mining

“…Tools should include a modeling facility for compliance rules such as the segregation of duties [7]. Automated analysis with respect to violations should be feasible (e.g.…”

Toward Better Mapping between Regulations and Operations of Enterprises Using Vocabularies and Semantic Similarity

“…Formal compliance checking offers several analysis benefits. It can enhance industry GRC solutions with such functionalities as formally finding out (non-)compliance to regulations [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9] against document-based evidence as in industry GRC solutions, computable explanation of proofs of (non-)compliance [10], [11] against expert's judgement as in industry GRC, management of frequent changes in regulations [12], [13] against functional heat maps derived from experts' knowledge as in industry GRC, etc.…”