Silvano Colombo Tosatto

Business Process Regulatory Compliance is Hard

Verifying whether a business process is compliant with a regulatory framework is a difficult task. In the present paper we prove the hardness of the business process regulatory compliance problem by taking into account a sub-problem of the general problem. This limited problem allows to verify only the compliance of structured processes with respect to a regulatory framework composed of a set of conditional obligations including a deadline. Experimental evidence from existing studies shows that compliance is a difficult task. In this paper, despite considering a sub-problem of the general problem, we provide some theoretical evidence of the difficulty of the task. In particular we show that the source of the complexity lies in the core language of verifying conditional obligations with a deadline. We prove that for this simplified case verifying partial compliance belongs to the class of NP-complete problems, and verifying full compliance belongs to the class of coNP-complete problems. Thus by proving the difficulty of a simplified compliance problem we prove that the general problem of verifying business process regulatory compliance is hard.

Integrating Legal-URN and Eunomos: Towards a Comprehensive Compliance Management Solution

Business process compliance with regulations has been a topic of many research areas in Computer Science such as Requirements Engineering RE, Artificial Intelligence AI, Logic and Natural Language Processing NLP. This work aims to provide a systematic way of establishing and managing compliance to assist decision-making and reporting. Despite many notable advances, few systems deal adequately with legal interpretation and modeling norms in an expressive way that is well-integrated with business modeling practices. In this paper, we bring together two leading systems, Legal-URN and Eunomos, for a comprehensive compliance management solution.

Towards an Abstract Framework for Compliance

The present paper aims at providing an abstract framework to define the regulatory compliance problem. In particular we show how the framework can be used to solve the problem of deciding whether a structured process is compliant with a single regulation, which is composed of a primary obligation and a chain of compensations.

Algorithms for tractable compliance problems

In general the problem of verifying whether a structured business process is compliant with a given set of regulations is NP-hard. The present paper focuses on identifying a tractable subset of this problem, namely verifying whether a structured business process is compliant with a single global obligation. Global obligations are those whose validity spans for the entire execution of a business process. We identify two types of obligations: achievement and maintenance.In the present paper we firstly define an abstract framework capable to model the problem and secondly we define procedures and algorithms to deal with the compliance problem of checking the compliance of a structured business process with respect to a single global obligation. We show that the algorithms proposed in the paper run in polynomial time.

Algorithms for Basic Compliance Problems

The present paper focuses on the problems of verifying compliance for global achievement and maintenance obligations. We first introduce the elements needed to identify and study compliance to these two classes of obligations in processes. Additionally, we define procedures and algorithms to efficiently deal with the identified compliance problem. We finally show that both algorithms proposed in the paper belong to the complexity class P.

Detecting Deontic Conflicts in Dynamic Settings

Regulations, through the use of obligations and permissions, are widely used in modern society to define acceptable behaviours. Thus it is indeed important that these regulations do not conflict with each other and contain contradicting obligations. In the present paper we focus on identifying conflicts between obligations in dynamic settings. We first show the need of an alternative semantics rather than the more classic modelled by standard deontic logic. Second we introduce a new semantics for the obligations capable of representing and reasoning about them in these dynamic settings, and lastly we use it to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions to identify conflicting obligations.

Bridging Social Network Analysis and Judgment Aggregation

Judgment aggregation investigates the problem of how to aggregate several individuals’ judgments on some logically connected propositions into a consistent collective judgment. The majority of work in judgment aggregation is devoted to studying impossibility results, but the relationship between the (social) dependencies that may exist between voters and the outcome of the voting process is traditionally not studied. In this paper, we use techniques from social network analysis to characterize the relations between the individuals participating in a judgment aggregation problem by analysing the similarity between their judgments in terms of social networks. We obtain a correspondence between a voting rule in judgment aggregation and a centrality measure from social network analysis and we motivate our claims by an empirical analysis. We also show how large social networks can be simplified by grouping individuals with the same voting behavior.

Visualizing normative systems: an abstract approach

Abstract normative systems allow to reason with norms even when their content is not detailed. In this paper, we propose a our preliminary results to visualize abstract normative systems, in such a way that we are able to reason with institutional facts, obligations and permissions. Moreover, we detect meaningful patterns emerging from the proposed visualization, and we show how these patterns can be used to define commonly used reusable solutions.

Contrary-To-Duties in games

The aim of the paper is to bring to the realm of game theory the well-known deontic notion of contrary-to-duty (CTD) obligation, so far not investigated in relation to optimality of strategic decisions. We maintain that, under a game-theoretical semantics, CTDs are well-suited to treat sub-ideal decisions. We also argue that, in a wide class of interactions, CTDs can used as a compact representation of coalitional choices leading to the achievement of optimal outcomes. Finally we investigate the properties of the proposed operators.

Visualizing Normative Systems: An Abstract ApproachDeontic Logic in Computer Science

Abstract normative systems allow to reason with norms even when their content is not detailed. In this paper, we propose a our preliminary results to visualize abstract normative systems, in such a way that we are able to reason with institutional facts, obligations and permissions. Moreover, we detect meaningful patterns emerging from the proposed visualization, and we show how these patterns can be used to define commonly used reusable solutions.