On Modelling Process Aspects With Deontic Event-Calculus

Abstract

Intuitive and faithful modelling the compliance requirements about the process aspects is a prerequisite for their automated compliance checking. Several formalisms with varying degrees of expressiveness for modelling compliance requirements have been reported in the literature. Deontic Event-Calculus (DEC) is a normative variant of Event-Calculus (EC) formalism with predicates to modelled normative requirements. However, currently, DEC does not support capturing normative requirements about the process aspects. In this paper, we extend DEC with new deontic predicates to model process aspects of data, time, control flow, and resources. The extended deontic predicates enable DEC to intuitively represent the compliance requirements relevant to aspects of a business process. Besides, we report the complexity evaluation of the extended deontic predicates using well-known Halstead’s complexity metrics. Evaluation result demonstrates that the complexity of modelling the compliance rules with DEC predicates is significantly lower even when the complexity of the standard EC is exponential.