Abductive Reasoning on Compliance Monitoring - Balancing Flexibility and Regulation.

Many emerging applications in Business Process Management, Clinical Guidelines, Service-Oriented and Multi-Agent Systems, are characterized by distribution, complex interaction and coordination dynamics. Such domains, apparently unrelated, all ask for a suitable tradeoff between flexibility and regulation. In this light, compliance checking emerged as an effective way to understand whether an observed course of interaction agrees with what is expected by a model of the system. In this paper, we single out a non exhaustive list of desiderata and challenges for compliance checking applied at runtime. We then argue that methods, tools and techniques of Computational Logic, and Abductive Reasoning in particular, can be fruitfully exploited to tackle all such challenges in a formally grounded, computationally effective way.