CRL and the Design-Time Compliance Management Framework

Following the crisis in 2008, the financial industry has faced growing numbers of laws and regulations globally. The number and complexity of these regulations are creating significant issues for governance, risk, and compliance management in almost all industrial sectors. This emergent business need calls for a structured and formal framework for managing business process compliance, which is sustainable throughout the complete business process lifecycle. A preventive focus is essential such that compliance is considered from the early stages of business process design, thus enforcing compliance by design. This chapter introduces the Compliance Request Language (CRL), which is at the heart of a formal design-time compliance verification, analysis, and management framework and addresses the “Check Compliance” use case. Following a model-driven engineering approach, CRL is a graphical domain-specific language that is formally grounded and enables the abstract pattern-based specification of compliance requirements to alleviate the complexities of formal/mathematical languages. An integrated tool-suite has been developed as an instantiation artifact, and the various validation activities have been conducted to ensure the validity, efficacy, and applicability of the proposed language and framework