Ensuring compliance in business process execution is crucial for regulatory adherence and operational eficiency. Compliance checking techniques verify whether executions conform to predefined rules, but existing approaches struggle with complex, multi-entity interactions and the lack of trust among participants. This research explores a twofold advancement on compliance checking topic. On the one hand is the enabling of object-centric compliance checking. On the other hand is the intertwining of novel compliance checking techniques with blockchain technology. Respectively, object-centric process mining provides a structured and accurate process representation. Blockchain, instead, ensures trust and transparency through its immutable transaction records. The connection point lies in the fact that the structured process representation of object-centric process mining aligns well with blockchain's transaction records, enabling seamless integration. Preliminary results include a compliance rule language that supports the object-centric perspective and a domain-specific language for blockchain-aware rule specifications. Future work aims to integrate these techniques into a unified compliance checking framework while addressing additional challenges in decentralized environments, leveraging smart contracts and real-time verification.
Ensuring compliance in business process execution is crucial for regulatory adherence and operational
eficiency [
This research aims to address these challenges by proposing advancements on the compliance
checking topic for both the fields of object-centric process mining and blockchain technology.
Objectcentric process mining enables a structured representation of process execution, which aligns well with
blockchain’s immutable transaction records. Indeed, smart contract execution data reflects the business
logic of DApps, as process execution data captures the operational behavior of business processes in
business process management systems [
We envision developing a comprehensive compliance checking framework that integrates objectcentric process mining potentialities and blockchain environment characteristics. The research questions guiding this study include: RQ1 How can compliance rules be efectively formalized within object-centric process mining to represent real-world compliance requirements? RQ2 How can compliance checking mechanisms be designed to operate eficiently in the blockchain environment?
After presenting the research problem, Section 2 describes the approach and proposed solution. Section 3 details the relation to the state of the art. Finally, Section 4 illustrates results achieved so far, a roadmap for the remainder of the PhD project, and open issues.
The research journey started with the consolidation of a collaboration between the University of
Camerino and the INGKA Group (https://www.ingka.com/), i.e., a leading multinational home furnishing
retailer controlling 379 stores worldwide. The project focused on answering business challenges in the
stock check process, which is performed daily in the INGKA Group stores and produces, on average,
450,000 inventory-related events per day. The experience revealed a significant gap in using compliance
checking techniques in industrial real-world scenarios and increased awareness of the stakeholders’
perception of applying compliance checking for business process management [
We envision this doctoral project consisting of a four-step methodological approach: State-of-the-Art study, approach design, formalization, and validation. However, the plan may be fixed, and some adjustments are likely to occur depending on the opportunities and advancements in the fields. An overview of the project phases and the current status is presented in Table 1.
Initially, a comprehensive literature review was conducted to analyze the actual state-of-the-art about compliance checking techniques and the theoretical research of blockchain technology to explore possible combinations that leverage both technologies. This review revealed limitations in current compliance rule languages, particularly their inability to capture complex interactions among multiple entities. Given the community eforts and attention to the new object-centric paradigm, this phase cannot be considered closed, since new advancements and proposals in the field are constantly under observation. Indeed, the shift from case-centric to object-centric process mining is a promising step to also solve the compliance checking of complex process behaviors. Building on these insights, we plan to design a new technique to formalize compliance rules that must exploit the object-centric concepts that are the reasons for the change of paradigm. The problems that object-centric process mining intends to solve are: deficiency , convergence, and divergence; which are addressed by the introduction of object entities (as important as events), event-to-object relations, and object-to-object relations, that
Phase State-of-the-Art
Design Formalization
Validation
Overview Analyze existing approaches in compliance checking, object-centric process mining, and blockchain-based process management Develop novel techniques exploiting object-centric mining and blockchain to enhance compliance checking Define formal models and rules to capture compliance logic and distributed process behaviors Evaluate the approach via case studies and simulations to assess efectiveness and scalability
Status Neverending In progress In progress
Pending enhance the expressivity of the representation of process in the event log. These new entities and components in the object-centric event log are the cornerstones for increasing the efectiveness of compliance checking techniques to represent real-world compliance requirements (RQ1). Regarding the decentralization of compliance checking, a feasible solution is represented by the intertwined use of such techniques with the mechanisms of smart contract execution. Indeed, smart contracts could allow auditors to agree on what and how to check compliance rules without relying on a central authority, thus guaranteeing transparency and security (RQ2). Once the complete approach is designed and a suitable compliance rule language formalized, the overall validation will be strategically planned through a series of case studies representative of both industrial and governmental contexts. These domains are characterized by complex regulatory environments, where compliance requirements span organizational boundaries and involve multiple, often heterogeneous, stakeholders. The evaluation will go beyond functional verification; it will critically assess the efectiveness of the approach in ensuring secure, transparent, and scalable compliance checking. Where possible, objective criteria such as correctness and performance will be used to evaluate the outcomes. The case studies will also help highlight any practical challenges or limitations of the approach, informing potential refinements and contributing to a clearer understanding of its applicability in real-world contexts.
The State-of-the-Art analysis explored both the fields of compliance checking (in case-centric and object-centric settings) and blockchain-based process management.
Compliance checking. The most relevant traditional compliance checking techniques are the
extended Compliance Rule Graph (eCRG) [
Blockchain-based process management. Blockchain technology, particularly smart contracts, has
been proposed as a means of ensuring data integrity and trust in distributed environments. This research
builds upon prior work by integrating blockchain-based audit trails with object-centric compliance
verification, addressing gaps in existing methodologies. Over the years, smart contract auditing has
attracted significant interest, leading to the development of various approaches [
Progess. The in-progress design and formalization phases include two preliminary studies.
The first one aims to propose a language to specify object-centric compliance rules, encompassing events based on specific object relations, attribute values, and exploiting flow relations across multiple objects. Particularly, it addresses limitations inherent to case-centric process mining approaches by introducing a novel method to relate events even without a single case-id to build a process instance. The related artifact is The O.C.3 (The Object-Centric Compliance Checking Tool), which is a web application for the definition of object-centric compliance rules and the application of such rules against an object-centric event log. The graphical interface enables users to: load an object-centric event log, create and apply object-centric compliance rules to generate matching and non-matching event sets.
In the second study, we broadened the application of compliance checking to data coming from smart
contract execution. To this aim, we introduced CoBlock, a domain-specific language designed for
compliance checking in smart contract execution on blockchain. It highlights the challenge that existing
compliance checking approaches face due to the lack of blockchain-specific rule specification languages.
To address this issue, the work proposes CoBlock as a solution, allowing compliance rules to explicitly
incorporate blockchain characteristics. We detailed the language’s design and demonstrated how it can
efectively be used to check smart contract behaviors against predefined compliance requirements.
Open Issues. The newly arising object-centric process mining is currently accompanied by a lack
of a general standard for the representation of object-centric event logs [
Another open issue is represented by the complexity of compliance requirements to be modeled into
compliance rules. From the broad range of fields of application of object-centric process mining stems
a similarly wide set of compliance requirements, each with the peculiarities of the topic on which
they rely. In this case, the literature ofers some cues for modeling behaviors belonging to distributed
scenarios [
A relevant issue that we experienced during the project with INGKA Group is that tools from academia are not always suitable for being employed in real industrial settings. A balance between the expressivity of new techniques and the ability to handle large datasets would enhance the relevancy and the applicability in real contexts where those techniques are highly demanded.
The last issue regards the enhanced transparency and security of compliance checking performed on-chain, thus exploiting the characteristics of the blockchain environment. It is notable to consider problems with the usage of blockchain due to the costs of storing data on-chain, the cost to compute the check, and the cost of changes to rules already deployed [20].
Roadmap. The following are the roads we intend to explore to pursue the doctoral project.
One combines the in-progress works to obtain a language for object-centric compliance checking for blockchain data, treating interacting smart contracts as multiple processes across organizations.
Another improvement could be considered to improve the usability of the proposed compliance rule languages. The idea is to propose a visual notation, e.g., a block-based notation, for building compliance rules that should ease the usage for non-practitioners or non-experts in auditing. It may be relevant to conduct a study on the usability and understandability of the most used compliance checking approaches, and compare them with the newly proposed block-based compliance rule language.
An additional direction of the research is the role of smart contracts in automating compliance checking. By embedding compliance rules within smart contracts, we could explore the potential of decentralized compliance checking mechanisms, where predefined conditions trigger automated checking actions. This advancement will facilitate exploring decentralized compliance requirements, where participants collaboratively define and check compliance rules over their processes without a centralized authority.
Finally, an empirical validation will be conducted to demonstrate the applicability and efectiveness of the proposed approach in real-world industrial scenarios. This will include evaluating its performance in diverse scenarios, assessing its usability, and gathering feedback from domain experts to refine the framework further.
During the preparation of this work, the author used DeepL, and Grammarly in order to: Grammar and spelling check, Paraphrase and reword. After using this tool/service, the author reviewed and edited the content as needed and take full responsibility for the publication’s content. collaborative business process with process mining and a model of generic compliance controls, CLEI Electronic Journal 25 (2022) 7:1–7:22. [20] A. A. Zarir, G. A. Oliva, Z. M. J. Jiang, A. E. Hassan, Developing cost-efective blockchainpowered applications: A case study of the gas usage of smart contract transactions in the ethereum blockchain platform, ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 30 (2021).