Proactive Business Process Compliance Monitoring with Event-Based Systems

Business processes spanning across organizational boundaries inside and outside an enterprise are increasingly becoming common practice in today's networked business environments. Service level agreements (SLAs) are negotiated between enterprises to measure, ensure and enforce service fulfillment and quality in this dynamic context. Often, SLA violations are directly associated with penalty costs, making it crucial to stick to agreed SLAs and proactively intervene in case of potential violations. Thus, a framework is required which allows for (1) efficient business process compliance monitoring, and (2) taking immediate action in case of compliance violations in order to minimize the business impact. In this paper we present a novel compliance monitoring framework based on a Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine. It allows modeling business processes as event flows, whereby events reflect state changes in a process or the business environment. Compliance checkpoints are added to an event flow and signify aspects which may be relevant to monitor, such as the relative timeframe between two events. Upon these, monitoring rules are defined to detect compliance violations and automatically trigger corrective actions.