Ensuring Compliance of Collaborative and Distributed Workflows

Automated workflows must comply with domain-specific regulations, standards and rules. So far, compliance issues have been mainly addressed in the context of intra-organizational workflows. In turn, there exists only little work dealing with compliance of distributed and collaborative workflows. As opposed to intra-organizational workflows, for distributed and collaborative workflows compliance must be addressed at different levels. This includes local compliance rules of a particular partner as well as global compliance rules to be obeyed by multiple partners collaborating in the distributed workflow. As a particular challenge, the private elements of a particular partner workflow are hidden to the partners and hence not known by them. Accordingly, only limited information is available when checking compliance of distributed and collaborative workflows. This paper introduces techniques enabling compliance checking for distributed and collaborative workflows, taking these privacy constraints into account. Hence it enables ensuring compliance of distributed and collaborative workflows at design time.