An Anti-Pattern-based Runtime Business Process Compliance Monitoring Framework

Today's dynamically changing business and compliance environment demand enterprises to continuously ensure their compliance with various laws, regulations and standards. Several business studies have concluded that compliance management is one of the main challenges companies face nowadays. Runtime compliance monitoring is of utmost importance for compliance assurance as during the prior design-time compliance checking phase, only a subset of the imposed compliance requirements can be statically checked due to the absence of required variable instantiation and contextual information. Furthermore, the fact that a BP model has been statically checked for compliance during design-time does not guarantee that the corresponding running BP instances are usually compliant due to human and machine errors. In this paper, we present a generic proactive runtime BP compliance monitoring framework, BP-MaaS. The framework incorporates a wide range of expressive high-level graphical compliance patterns for the abstract specification of runtime constraints. Compliance monitoring is achieved using anti-patterns, a novel mechanism which is agnostic towards any underlying monitoring execution technology. As a proof-of-concept, complex event processing (CEP) technology is adopted as one of the possible realizations of the monitoring engine of the framework. An integrated tool-suite has been developed as an instantiation artifact of BP-MaaS, and the validation of the approach is undertaken in several directions, which includes internal validity and case study conducts considering two real-life case studies from the banking domain.