Biblio

In an agricultural supply chain, farmers, food processors, transportation agencies, importers, and exporters must comply with different regulations imposed by one or more jurisdictions depending on the nature of their business operations. Supply chain stakeholders conventionally transport their goods, along with the corresponding documentation via regulators for compliance checks. This is generally followed by a tedious and manual process to ensure the goods meet regulatory requirements. However, supply chain systems are changing through digitization. In digitized supply chains, data is shared with the relevant stakeholders through digital supply chain platforms, including blockchain technology. In such datadriven digital supply chains, the regulators may be able to leverage digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to automate the compliance verification process. However, a barrier to progress is the risk that information will not be credible, thus reversing the gains that automation could achieve. Automating compliance based on inaccurate data may compromise the safety and credibility of the agricultural supply chain, which discourages regulators and other stakeholders from adopting and relying on automation. Within this article we consider the challenges of digital supply chains when we describe parts of the compliance management process and how it can be automated to improve the operational efficiency of agricultural supply chains. We introduce assisted autonomy as a means to pragmatically automate the compliance verification process by combining the power of digital systems while keeping the human in-the-loop. We argue that autonomous compliance is possible, but that the need for human led inspection processes will never be replaced by machines, however it can be minimised through “assisted autonomy”.

Software has emerged as a significant part of many domains, including financial service platforms, social networks and vehicle control. Standards organizations have responded to this by creating regulations to address issues such as safety and privacy. In this context, compliance of software with standards has emerged as a key issue. For software development organizations, compliance is a complex and costly goal to achieve and is often accomplished by producing so-called assurance cases, which demonstrate that the system indeed satisfies the property imposed by a standard (e.g., safety, privacy, security). As systems and standards undergo evolution for a variety of reasons, maintaining assurance cases multiplies the effort. In this work, we propose to exploit the connection between the field of model management and the problem of compliance management and propose methods that use model management techniques to address compliance scenarios such as assurance case evolution and reuse. For validation, we ground our approaches on the automotive domain and the ISO 26262 standard for functional safety of road vehicles.