On July 22, 2019, David Knuplesch successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled

Enabling Multi-Perspective Business Process Compliance

at Ulm University, Germany. The DBIS team is pleased to congratulate David on his successful PhD defense (Dr. rer. nat.) and wishes him and his family all the best for their future. David worked on his PhD thesis in a joint project of the Universities of Vienna and Ulm, in the meantime has been appointed by alphaQuest GmbH.

Davids's PhD advisor and PhD promotor is Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert. The role of the external referee is filled by Prof. Dr. Stefanie Rinderle-Ma (University of Vienna). David conducted his PhD research in the C3Pro project, which delivered a comprehensive framework for ensuring compliance in adaptive collaborative processes. 

Members of the PhD committee:

• Prof. Dr. Franz Hauck (Chairman)
• Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert (Promotor and First Referee)
• Prof. Dr. Stefanie Rinderle-Ma  (External Referee, University of Vienna)
• Prof. Dr. Birte Glimm (Core Committee Member)
• Prof. Dr. Mathias Tichy (Core Committee Member)

Abstract

A challenge for any enterprise is to ensure that its business processes conform with compliance rules, i.e., semantic constraints on the multiple perspectives of a business process. Compliance rules stem, for example, from legal regulations, corporate best practices, domain-specific guidelines, and standards. In particular, compliance rules are multi-perspective, i.e., they restrict not only the process control flow, but refer to other process perspectives (e.g. time, data, and resources) and interactions with partner processes (i.e. message exchanges) as well.

The aim of this thesis is to improve the specification and verification of multi-perspective process compliance through three contributions:

1. The extended Compliance Rule Graph (eCRG) language that enables the multi-perspective, visual modeling of compliance rules that, besides control flow, may refer to the time, data, resource and interaction perspective of a business process.
2. A framework for monitoring the compliance of running processes with a given set of eCRG compliance rules.
3. Techniques for the verification of business process compliance regarding the in-teraction perspective. In particular, we consider compliance verification for cross-organizational business processes, for which only incomplete process knowledge is available.

All contributions were thoroughly evaluated based on proof-of-concept prototypes, case studies, empirical evaluations, and comparisons with related works.