Impact Measures for Business Process Compliance:Analyzing Impact Compliance and Declarative Specifications

A business is an organization that engages in commercial, industrial, or professional activity on a systematic and predefined manner. Key aspects of the business include profit motive, exchange of goods and services, organization and management, and risk. A business’s objective is typically to supply goods or services to consumers or to other businesses in order to make a profit or to achieve a given non-profit purpose. Businesses can range from small-scale enterprises like neighborhood shops to massive multinational corporations but they are distinguished from occasional or unorganized endeavors for their scope, that is to organize their own activities on a specified way, in many cases formally defined, a priori with respect to the activities. In other terms, businesses have their own predefined processes, or workflows. A process is a set of events, procedures, or operations that are performed in admissible systematic orders to reach a specified conclusion or purpose. In industrial and agrictu- lural production, for instance, a process is the activity of converting inputs (such as raw materials, data, or resources) into outputs (finished goods, results, or solutions) using a set of structured procedures. Key elements of a process include sequence, inputs and outputs, transformation, repetition, and control. A business process is a comprehensive formal model that represents the behavior of complex systems, both existing and newly designed ones. These models capture the interactions and synchronizations between humans and machines, making them crucial for understanding and optimizing the dynamic interplay within business operations. Compliance refers to adherence to laws, regulations, guidelines, and specifications relevant to organization operations. It ensures that businesses operate within a given normative background and meet the standards set by regulatory bodies, industry best practices, and internal policies. Ensuring compliance means that business processes are aligned with regulatory requirements, organizational goals, and both soft and hard rules imposed on the processes themselves. Compliance is essential for maintaining legal and ethical integrity, minimizing risks, and enhancing the reputation of the organization. Without compliance warranties, a business may incur penalties from regulatory bodies or have adverse effects in the future, whether economically, socially, or environmentally. Business processes must adhere to various forms of compliance, in the realm of practical business life including: a General Regulatory Compliance: This ensures business processes conform to external authorities’ laws, regulations, and standards. It involves adhering to legal requirements that govern the industry or sector in which the organization operates. b Goal Compliance: This aligns business processes with predefined organizational goals and objectives. It ensures that the processes support the strategic aims and targets of the organization. 1 c Impact Compliance: This ensures that the impacts of business processes remain within acceptable thresholds, thereby minimizing negative effects of the execution of the process. It involves assessing and managing the potential effects of processes on various aspects of the business. d Environmental Compliance: This ensures that the impacts of business pro- cesses do not exceed constraints set from an environmental perspective. It involves adherence to environmental regulations and practices that mitigate adverse en- vironmental effects. Adhering to these compliance requirements helps ensure that business processes operate effectively within legal and ethical boundaries while sup- porting organizational objectives and minimizing negative impacts on society and the environment. This dissertation primarily focuses on impact compliance and environmental compliance, that I shall show are analogous in technical terms. The purpose, on a generic viewpoint, is to minimize the emission of Carbon dioxide (CO2) but can also be used to regulate other pollutant substances. It delves into the definition of impact compliance, its integration with existing compliance concepts, and its evaluation from multiple perspectives. When we discuss Compliance, there are three perspectives of compliance i.e. cor- rective, detective, and preventive. All these three perspective base themselves on the detective dimension, for no correction or prevention can be performed without leaning out the detection of (potential) uncompliances. Corrective measures are intended to limit the extent of any consequences caused by non-compliant situations. They are reactive and aim to address and mitigate is- sues after they have occurred. Examples include manual audits, which are periodic reviews conducted by individuals to identify and rectify compliance issues, and auto- mated detections, which are systems and tools that automatically detect deviations from compliance standards. Detective measures aim to identify non-compliant situations “after-the-fact”. They are essential for recognizing and addressing issues that have already impacted the business process. These measures also include manual audits and automated detections, similar to corrective measures. Preventive measures embed compliance into the business processes from the out- set, a concept known as “Compliance by Design”. The objective is to proactively prevent non-compliance by designing processes that inherently adhere to compliance re- quirements. The dissertation explores the synthesis of business processes through declarative specifications, which provide a structured framework for defining and enforcing com- pliance. It investigates how impact compliance can be effectively integrated with regulatory and goal compliance, ensuring a holistic approach to business process man- agement. Business Process Compliance (BPC) is a collection of methodologies used to evaluate business processes to ensure they adhere to specified constraints. These con- straints, which may be imposed due to regulatory requirements or organizational goals, are essential for maintaining the integrity and reliability of business operations. Business Process Compliance (BPC) methods assess whether an execution trace exists—a sequence of actions within the process—that violates any of the imposed constraints. Conversely, this evaluation can also involve superimposing a set of constraints on the process and 2 then assessing all possible executions for compliance. This dual approach to Business Process Compliance (BPC) is highly relevant in real-world applications, particularly in the realm of regulatory compliance. Businesses must verify their processes against a nor- mative framework, which includes not only stringent regulations but also softer guidelines, product specifications, and standards. This verification ensures that processes meet the expectations set by regulatory bodies and the business owners themselves. In this dissertation, I introduce a novel type of compliance, termed impact compli- ance. This concept is designed to evaluate whether a business process adheres to a set of constraints by ensuring that the undesirable effects of executing tasks within the pro- cess are maintained below specified limits. Impact compliance is showed to be usable for minimizing negative outcomes associated with business operations such as for regulating the emission of pollutant substances including carbon dioxide(CO2), thereby optimizing overall process performance. I demonstrate that under certain structural conditions, the problems associated with checking for compliance are polynomially solvable on determin- istic machines. Specifically, the task of determining whether any execution trace violates the constraints is generally NP-complete. However, verifying that all possible executions adhere to the constraints is polynomially solvable, provided the structural conditions are met. This dissertation delves also into the synthesis of business processes through declar- ative specifications and examines the significant role of compliance, discussing impact compliance by design. I also design a method to compare business processes as a whole in terms of impact, and therefore obtain a notion of impact similarity that is in turn shown to be useful for process mining. By introducing and detailing the concept of impact compliance, I provide a framework for ensuring that business processes not only comply with regulatory and organizational standards but also minimize undesired effects, thereby enhancing operational efficiency and time Complexity. This research contributes to the field by offering a detailed ex- ploration of impact compliance, proposing innovative methods for integrating impact compliance into business process models, and demonstrating the application of these methods through various case studies and theoretical analyses.