Legal compliance is an important part of certifying the correct behaviour of a business process. To be compliant, organizations might hard-wire regulations into processes, limiting the discretion that workers have when choosing what activities should be executed in a case. Worse, hard-wired compliant processes are difficult to change when laws change, and this occurs very often. This paper proposes a model-driven approach to process compliance and combines a) reference models from laws, and b) business process models. Both reference and process models are expressed in a declarative process language, The Dynamic Condition Response (DCR) graphs. They are subject to testing and verification, allowing law practitioners to check consistency against the intent of the law. Compliance checking is a combination of alignments between events in laws and events in a process model. In this way, a reference model can be used to check different process variants. Moreover, changes in the reference model due to law changes do not necessarily invalidate existing processes, allowing their reuse and adaptation. We exemplify the framework via the alignment of laws and business rules and a real contract change management process, Finally, we show how compliance checking for declarative processes is decidable, and provide a polynomial-time approximation that contrasts NP complexity algorithms used in compliance checking for imperative business processes. All-together, this paper presents technical and methodological steps that are being used by legal practitioners in municipal governments in their efforts towards the digitalization of work practices in the public sector

Business Process Compliance using Reference Models of Law

ETAPS is a confederation of several conferences, each with its own Programme Committee and Steering Committee. ETAPS is the most important and visible annual European event related to software sciences. Altogether, more than 500 researchers participate in this event every year. The confederated conferences cover various aspects of software systems, ranging from theoretical foundations to programming language developments, compiler advancements, analysis tools, formal approaches to software engineering, and security.

A gather.town room will be open during the whole conference, which can be found here:

https://gather.town/app/nSgVv0DDYoCkmdkP/ETAPS2021

Password: Luxembourg2021

This can be used to meet in the coffee breaks.

 PDF's of the papers are available on https://etaps.org/2021/programme