Towards a Formal Framework for Partial Compliance of Business Processes

Binary "YES-NO" notions of process compliance are not very helpful to managers for assessing the operational performance of their company because a large number of cases fall in the grey area of partial compliance. Hence, it is necessary to have ways to quantify partial compliance in terms of metrics and be able to classify actual cases by assigning a numeric value of compliance to them. In this paper, we formulate an evaluation framework to quantify the level of compliance of business processes across different levels of abstraction (such as task, trace and process level) and across multiple dimensions of each task (such as temporal, monetary, role-, data-, and quality-related) to provide managers more useful information about their operations and to help them improve their decision making processes. Our approach can also add social value by making social services provided by local, state and federal governments more flexible and improving the lives of citizens.