Compliance checking of data-aware and resource-aware compliance requirements

Compliance checking is gaining importance as today’s organizations need to show that their business practices are in accordance with predefined (legal) requirements. Current compliance checking techniques are mostly focused on checking the control-flow perspective of business processes. This paper presents an approach for checking the compliance of observed process executions taking into account data, resources, and control-flow. Unlike the majority of conformance checking approaches we do not restrict the focus to the ordering of activities (i.e., control-flow). We show a collection of typical data and resource-aware compliance rules together with some domain specific rules. Moreover providing diagnostics and insight about the deviations is often neglected in current compliance checking techniques. We use control-flow and data-flow alignment to check compliance of processes and combine diagnostics obtained from both techniques to show deviations from prescribed behavior. Furthermore we also indicate the severity of observed deviations. This approach integrates with two existing approaches for control-flow and temporal compliance checking, allowing for multi-perspective diagnostic information in case of compliance violations. We have implemented our techniques and show their feasibility by checking compliance of synthetic and real life event logs with resource and data-aware compliance rules. Keywords: compliance checking; auditing; data-aware and resource-aware compliance requirements; conformance checking