Compliance checking between business processes and business contracts

It is a typical scenario that many organisations have their business processes specified independently of their business contracts. This is because of the lack of guidelines and tools that facilitate derivation of processes from contracts but also because of the traditional mindset of treating contracts separately from business processes. This paper provides a solution to one specific problem that arises from this situation, namely the lack of mechanisms to check whether business processes are compliant with business contracts. The central part of the paper is logic based formalism for describing both the semantics of contract and the semantics of compliance checking procedures