summary: Designing Compliant Business Processes with Obligations and Permissions

S. Goedertier and J. Vanthienen. Designing compliant business processes with obligations and permissions. In J. Eder and S. Dustdar, editors, Business Process Management Workshops, volume 4103 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 5–14. Springer, 2006.

This paper introduces a new language called PENELOPE (Process ENtailment from the ELicitation of Obligations and PErmissions), a language to express temporal rules about the obligations and permissions in a business interaction. It does not consider the execution time monitoring of business contracts, but rather considers the impact of sequence and timing constraints on business process design.

PENELOPE uses deontic properties to express rules and regulations. It distinguishes between necessity and possibility in business policy and regulations, by considering the deontic modalities of obligation, conditional commitment and permission. It does not consider prohibition, as it is assumed if neither permission nor obligation can be derived. It allows to explicitly define deadlines. The following are some PENELOPE’s properties:

Termination of a process means that no obligations or permissions exist. If there exist obligations or permissions and no permissible performance exist to carry the business interaction forward it is called a deadlocks situation. Where In a livelock situation, the protocol state is trapped in an infinite loop. Deontic conflicts arise when there are protocols state a business partner has both the permission and the prohibition to an activity. This type of conflict is not possible in PENELOPE, as it does not make use of prohibition. Temporal conflicts occur when two deontic assignments at the same time initiate and terminate a permission, obligation or conditional commitment. Trust conflict occur when a business interaction puts the business in a position were it has direct obligations towards non-trusted business partners that involve sensitive activities. The paper provided an algorithm if followed one could avoid all these conflicts and locks.

Goedertier and Vanthienen in this paper presented a new language called PENELOPE, which is based on deontic logic. It has the ability to represent obligation, conditional commitment and permission. It does not represent prohibition, as it is assumed in case no permission nor obligation was presented. The assumption of prohibition gave the ability to avoid conflicts. It does not provide what to do in case of violation, as the language is more concerned with design time than execution time.