Regulations Expressed As Logical Models (REALM)

Abstract

Recent years have seen a number of high-profile incidents of corporate accounting fraud, security violations, terrorist acts, and disruptions of major financial markets. This has lead to a proliferation of new regulations that directly impact businesses. As a result, businesses, in particular publicly traded companies, face the daunting task of complying with an increasing number of intricate and constantly evolving regulations. Together with the growing complexity of today’s enterprises this requires a holistic compliance management approach with the goal of continually increasing automation. We introduce REALM (Regulations Expressed as Logical Models), a metamodel and method for modeling regulations and managing them in a systematic lifecycle in an enterprise. We formalize regulatory requirements as sets of compliance rules in a novel real-time temporal object logic over concept models in UML, together with metadata for traceability. REALM provides the basis for subsequent model transformations, deployment, and continuous monitoring and enforcement of compliance in real business processes and IT systems.