An Operational Semantics for the Extended Compliance Rule Graph Language

A challenge for any enterprise is to ensure conformance of its business processes with imposed compliance rules. Usually, the latter may constrain multiple perspectives of a business process, including control flow, data, time, resources, and interactions with business partners. Like for process modeling, intuitive visual languages have been proposed for specifying compliance rules. However, business process compliance cannot completely be decided at design time, but needs to be monitored during run time as well. In previous work we introduced the extended Compliance Rule Graph (eCRG) language that enables the visual monitoring of business process compliance regarding the control flow, data, time, and resource perspectives as well as the interactions a process has with business partners. This technical report introduces an operational semantics of the eCRG language. In particular, the state of a visual compliance rule is reflected through markings and annotations of an eCRG. The proposed operational semantics not only allows detecting compliance violations at run-time, but visually highlights their causes as well. Finally, it allows providing recommendations to users in order to proactively ensure for a compliant continuation of a running business process.