On Enabling Compliance of Cross-Organizational Business Processes

Process compliance deals with the ability of a company to ensure that its business processes comply with domain-specific regulations and rules. So far, compliance issues have been mainly addressed for intra-organizational business processes, whereas there exists only little work dealing with compliance in the context of cross-organizational processes that involve multiple business partners. As opposed to intra-organizational processes, for a cross-organizational process, compliance must be addressed at different modeling levels, ranging from interaction models to public process models to private processes of the partners. Accordingly, there exist different levels for modeling compliance rules. In particular, we distinguish between local compliance rules of a particular partner and global compliance rules to be obeyed by all partners involved in the cross-organizational process. This paper focuses on checking the compliance of interaction models. For this purpose, we introduce the notion of compliability, which shall guarantee that an interaction model is not conflicting with a set of imposed global compliance rules.