On the satisfiability of authorization requirements in business process

Satisfiability problem of authorization requirements in business process asks whether there exists an assignment of users to tasks that satisfies all the requirements, and methods were proposed to solve this problem. However, the proposed methods are inefficient in the sense that a step of the methods is searching all the possible assignments, which is time-consuming. This work proposes a method to solve the satisfiability problem of authorization requirements without browsing the assignments space. Our method uses improved separation of duty algebra (ISoDA) to describe a satisfiability problem of qualification requirements and quantification requirements (Separation of Duty and Binding of Duty requirements). Thereafter, ISoDA expressions are reduced into multi-mutual-exclusive expressions. The satisfiabilities of multi-mutual-exclusive expressions are determined by an efficient algorithm proposed in this study. The experiment shows that our method is faster than the state-of-the-art methods.