Aligning Processes with High-Level Requirements: Goal-Model-Based Compliance Checking (Extended Version)

Context Process compliance refers to the alignment between business processes and regulatory requirements. Compliance is challenging because it requires expressing the intent and possible interpretations of laws into formal models, aligning models with foreseeable executions, and inspecting whether these executions could generate violations. Business process compliance has been studied through conformance checking techniques. Many regulatory requirements are stated in subjective and high level terms. This limits the application of rule checking and alignment checking algorithms to cases where requirements are formally specified. Objective This paper investigates how compliance can be assessed against high level requirements and non functional requirements rather than low level process events. The paper raises the abstraction level of compliance checking from specific task execution to the satisfaction of high level business goals and subjective qualities. Method The paper proposes a framework that links process models with goal models to capture functional decomposition, non functional requirements, and contribution links. The framework was developed iteratively with legal practitioners. Business processes, in imperative and declarative notations, are represented as labelled transition systems. Goals and qualities are modelled using iStar models. A mapping function synchronises process activities with goal elements. Compliance is checked through state reachability where all qualities are satisfied, with computational support from the Kogi tool. Compliance is refined into weak compliance, strong compliance, and monotonic quality satisfaction, also called stability. Results From a technical view, the framework distinguishes strong compliance, weak compliance, and stability. This supports expressiveness, feasibility, and modularity claims for the framework. From a legal perspective, the framework supports transparency for evidence based decision making and traceability of knowledge bases that support system development. The use case is based on Regulation EC 261/2004. Conclusions The proposed approach enables compliance checking against high level requirements and non functional requirements. It distinguishes compliant behaviours and supports goal satisfaction traceability compared to rule based conformance methods.