A Model-Based Framework for Legal Policy Simulation and Legal Compliance Checking

Analyzing legal policies for many laws, such as taxes and social benefits, is a common way for governments to identify risks, e.g., risk of legal policies not achieving expected revenue. A typical analysis includes validation of policies and the verification of the systems implementing them. One efficient way to validate policies is simulation, e.g., by simulating whether a proposed law reform would realize target objectives. Once validated, policies are implemented into public administration procedures and eGovernment applications. Systems implementing legal policies also need to be analyzed and verified, e.g., through testing, to ensure that they are compliant with the underlying policies. Currently, legal policy analysis is conducted using a combination of spreadsheets and software code. Such strategy suffers mainly from being hard to use by legal experts due to the lack of adequate background. This is partly rooted in the fact that available techniques to formalize legal policies are based on complex logical expressions and code. The main goal of this research project, that this paper describes, is to narrow the aforementioned expertise gap by proposing convenient, systematic and automated techniques to support analysis of legal polices from their design to their implementation.