Computational Complexity of Compliance and Conformance: Drawing a Line Between Theory and Practice

Abstract

In the present chapter we focus our attention on the computational complexity of proving regulatory compliance of business process models. While the topic has never received the deserved attention, we argue that the theoretical results, both existing and yet to find, are far reaching for many areas related to the problem of proving compliance of process models. Therefore, we provide here and discuss the existing results concerning the theoretical computational complexity of the problem, as well as discussing some further areas that can potentially advance the knowledge about the issue, and other closely related disciplines that can either bring or take insights to this area.