On the formal specification of regulatory compliance: A comprehensive analysis

Today’s business environment demands a high rate of compliance of service-enabled business processes with which enterprises are required to cope. Thus, a comprehensive compliance management framework is required such that compliance management must crosscut all the stages of the complete business process lifecycle, starting from the very early stages of business process design. Formalizing compliance requirements based on a formal foundation of an expressive logical language enables the application of associated verification and analysis tools to ensure the compliance. In this paper, we have conducted a comparative analysis between three languages that can be used as the formal foundation of business process compliance requirements, focusing on design-time phase. Two main families of languages have been identified, which are: the temporal and deontic families of logic. In particular, we have considered LTL, CTL and FCL. The comparative analysis is based on the capabilities and limitations of each language and a set of required identified features.