Cross-Instance Regulatory Compliance Checking of Business Process Event Logs

Event logs capture the execution of business processes, such that each task is represented by an event and each individual execution is a chronological sequence of events, called an event trace. Event logs allow after-the-act and runtime analysis of deployed business processes to verify whether their execution complies with regulations and business requirements. Checking the compliance of a single sequence of events in a trace is straightforward and a number of approaches have been proposed to address this. However, some regulations or business rules span multiple process instances, requiring a cross-instance analysis. In order to check whether such requirements are maintained at all times, multiple traces need to be analysed together, which can result in a combinatorial computational complexity. In this article, we present a novel approach that efficiently checks runtime regulatory compliance based on event logs, while supporting cross-instance rule evaluation and extensible function evaluation over sequences of attribute data values. The efficiency and applicability of the proposed method is tested in a two-pronged evaluation, showing a significant improvement over existing techniques with respect to capabilities as well as computational complexity. The approach presented in this paper is subject to a patent application, with patent number WO2021/248201.