Process Modelling: The Deontic Way

Current enterprise systems rely heavily on the modelling and enactment of business processes. One of the key criteria for a business process is to represent not just the behaviours of the participants but also how the contractual relationships among them evolve over the course of an interaction. In this paper we provide a framework in which one can define policies/business rules using deontic assignments to represent the contractual relationships. To achieve this end we use a combination of deontic/normative concepts like proclamation, directed obligation and direct action to account for a deontic theory of commitment which in turn can be used to model business processes in their organisational settings. In this way we view a business process as a social interaction process for the purpose of doing business. Further, we show how to extend the $i*$ framework, a well known organisational modelling technique, so as to accommodate our notion of deontic dependency.