Compliance Checking of Organizational Interactions

Abstract

In business environments, different sorts of regulations are imposed to restrict the behavior of both public and private organizations, ranging from legal regulations to internal policies. Regulatory compliance is important for the safety of individual actors as well as the overall business environment. However, complexity derives from not only the contents of the regulations but also their interdependencies. As such, the verification of whether actors are able to comply with the combined regulations cannot be done by checking each regulation separately. To these ends, we introduce a normative structure Norm Nets (NNs) for modeling sets of interrelated regulations and setting a basis for compliance checking of organizational interactions against interrelated regulations. NNs support a modular design by providing the constructs to represent regulations and the relationships between them. Additionally, we propose a computational mechanism to reason about regulatory compliance by mapping NNs to Colored Petri Nets (CPNs). We show that compliance checking of both individual actors’ behavior and the collective behavior of the business environment can be achieved automatically using state space analysis techniques of CPNs. The approach is illustrated with a case study from the domain of international trade.