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Algorithms for tractable compliance problems

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Abstract

In general the problem of verifying whether a structured business process is compliant with a given set of regulations is NP-hard. The present paper focuses on identifying a tractable subset of this problem, namely verifying whether a structured business process is compliant with a single global obligation. Global obligations are those whose validity spans for the entire execution of a business process. We identify two types of obligations: achievement and maintenance.

In the present paper we firstly define an abstract framework capable to model the problem and secondly we define procedures and algorithms to deal with the compliance problem of checking the compliance of a structured business process with respect to a single global obligation. We show that the algorithms proposed in the paper run in polynomial time.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Communication Unit, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, L-1359, Luxembourg

    Silvano Colombo Tosatto, Pierre Kelsen, Qin Ma, Marwane el Kharbili & Leendert van der Torre

  2. NICTA, Brisbane, QLD, 4001, Australia

    Guido Governatori

  3. Dipartment di Informatica, Università di Torino, Torino, 10149, Italy

    Silvano Colombo Tosatto

Authors
  1. Silvano Colombo Tosatto
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  2. Pierre Kelsen
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  3. Qin Ma
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  4. Marwane el Kharbili
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  5. Guido Governatori
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  6. Leendert van der Torre
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Silvano Colombo Tosatto.

Additional information

Silvano Colombo Tosatto studied computer science at the Università di Torino where he received the MS degree in 2010 defending his thesis entitled “Neural Symbolic Learning Systems: Neural Networks for Normative Reasoning”. He is currently working toward the PhD degree at the University of Luxembourg, where he is mainly working on the complexity of proving regulatory compliance. His main research interest is artificial intelligence, in particular agent architectures, multi-agent systems, and normative reasoning.

Pierre Kelsen received the PhD degree in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the area of parallel graph algorithms. He is a professor of computer science at the University of Luxembourg, where he leads the Laboratory for Advanced Software Systems. He held postdoctoral positions at the University of British Columbia and the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics. His research interests include model-driven engineering, formal methods, and algorithms.

Qin Ma is a research associate in the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor in Luxembourg. She has received a PhD in computer science from the University of Paris 7 and INRIA-Rocquencourt in France in 2005. Her PhD thesis is about functional, concurrent, and object-oriented programming language design. Her main research interests are model-driven software engineering, formal semantics, regulatory compliance management, enterprise architecture, and concurrency theory.

Marwane El Kharbili developed in his PhD thesis methods and languages for enterprise regulatory compliance management of enterprise models and business processes by applying and extending techniques form formal methods, security policies and software language engineering. His core fields of research are enterprise architectures/business process management and model driven engineering. His main area of research covers the development of procedures, languages and tools for the modelling, automated verification and analysis of regulatory compliance in information systems as well as the governance thereof.

Guido Governatori received the PhD degree in legal informatics from the University of Bologna, Italy. He is a senior principal researcher in the Software Systems Research Group at NICTA, where he leads the research activities on business process compliance. He is also an adjoint professor in the BPM Group at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. His research interests include defeasible reasoning, modal deontic and non-classical logics and their applications to normative reasoning, agent systems, and business process modelling.

Leendert (Leon) van der Torre joined the University of Luxembourg as a full professor for intelligent systems in January 2006. He developed the BOID agent architecture (with colleagues from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), input/output logic (with David Makinson) and the game-theoretic approach to normative multiagent systems (with Guido Boella from University of Torino). He has authored over 230 papers indexed by DBLP and 30 papers in disciplines outside computer science. He is an editor of the handbook of deontic logic and normative systems (2013), deontic logic corner editor of the Journal of Logic and Computation, and member of the editorial boards of Logic Journal of the IGPL and the IfCoLog Journal of Logics and their Applications.

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Colombo Tosatto, S., Kelsen, P., Ma, Q. et al. Algorithms for tractable compliance problems. Front. Comput. Sci. 9, 55–74 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-014-3239-y

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