On the analysis of regulations using defeasible rules

Regulations are a wide-spread and important part of government and business. They codify how products must be made and processes should be performed. Such regulations can be difficult to understand and apply. In an environment of growing complexity of, and change in, regulation, automated support for reasoning with regulations is becoming increasingly necessary. In this paper we claim that such automated support can be provided on the basis of defeasible logical rules. We highlight the support that can be provided by this logical tool, and illustrate some aspects using examples from one specific domain: university regulations.