Verifying Business Process Compliance by Reasoning about Actions

In this paper we address the problem of verifying business process compliance with norms. To this end, we employ reasoning about actions in a temporal action theory. The action theory is defined through a combination of Answer Set Programming and Dynamic Linear Time Temporal Logic (DULL). The temporal action theory allows us to formalize a business process as a temporal domain description, possibly including temporal constraints. Obligations in norms are captured by the notion of commitment, which is borrowed from the social approach to agent communication. Norms are represented using (possibly) non monotonic causal laws which (possibly) enforce new obligations. In this context, verifying compliance amounts to verify that no execution of the business process leaves some commitment unfulfilled. Compliance verification can be performed by Bounded Model Checking.