An Indexing Technique for Compliance Checking and Maintenance in Large Process and Rule Repositories

Abstract

Business process compliance has become a crucial challenge for enterprises throughout different domains. However, little thought has been spent on the management and verification of compliance rules in large process repositories so far, even though several case studies show, that the amount of business processes can reach from a small set to hundreds of business processes being subject to several hundreds of compliance rules. In this paper we present activity-oriented indexing techniques for efficient compliance checking which are particularly applicable in process and rule repositories where no a-priori knowledge, \eg based on policies, is available. Different applications beyond compliance checking are discussed such as process similarity notions or maintenance issues. The effects of applying indexing on the effort for compliance checks are discussed along with further aspects such as maintenance of process model and compliance rule repositories. Finally, a case study from the higher education domain in Austria is provided. The presented techniques constitute a first step towards a cost- and effort-aware management of large business process and compliance rule repositories.