Predictive Compliance Monitoring in Process-Aware Information Systems: State of the Art, Functionalities, Research Directions

Business process compliance is a key area of business process management and aims at ensuring that processes obey to compliance constraints such as regulatory constraints or business rules imposed on them. Process compliance can be checked during process design time based on verification of process models and at runtime based on monitoring the compliance states of running process instances. For existing compliance monitoring approaches it remains unclear whether and how compliance violations can be predicted, although predictions are crucial in order to prepare and take countermeasures in time. This work, hence, analyzes existing literature from compliance monitoring as well as predictive process monitoring and provides an updated framework of compliance monitoring functionalities. For each compliance monitoring functionality we elicit prediction requirements and analyze their coverage by existing approaches. Based on this analysis, we delimit predictive compliance monitoring as new research area. Afterwards, open challenges and research directions for predictive compliance and process monitoring are elaborated.