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Unlocking Sustainability Compliance: Characterizing the EU Taxonomy for Business Process Management

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Enterprise Design, Operations, and Computing (EDOC 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 15409))

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Abstract

To promote sustainable business practices, and to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, the EU has developed the taxonomy of sustainable activities, which describes when exactly business practices can be considered sustainable. While the taxonomy has only been recently established, progressively more companies will have to report how much of their revenue was created via sustainably executed business processes. To help companies prepare to assess whether their business processes comply with the constraints outlined in the taxonomy, we investigate in how far these criteria can be used for conformance checking, that is, assessing in a data-driven manner, whether business process executions adhere to regulatory constraints. For this, we develop a few-shot learning pipeline to characterize the constraints of the taxonomy with the help of an LLM as to the process dimensions they relate to. We find that many constraints of the taxonomy are useable for conformance checking, particularly in the sectors of energy, manufacturing, and transport. This will aid companies in preparing to monitor regulatory compliance with the taxonomy automatically, by characterizing what kind of information they need to extract, and by providing a better understanding of sectors where such an assessment is feasible and where it is not.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Referred to as economic activities in the taxonomy; to avoid confusion with the notion of business process activities we use the term business practice.

  2. 2.

    See https://viridad.eu, https://www.briink.com/solutions/esg-questionnaire-assistant and https://ec.europa.eu/sustainable-finance-taxonomy/wizard [Accessed: 23/05/2024].

  3. 3.

    See https://ec.europa.eu/sustainable-finance-taxonomy/taxonomy-compass/the-compass and https://ec.europa.eu/sustainable-finance-taxonomy/assets/documents/taxonomy.xlsx [Accessed: 18/06/2024].

  4. 4.

    https://ec.europa.eu/sustainable-finance-taxonomy/assets/documents/taxonomy.xlsx [Accessed: 18/06/2024].

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/fyndalf/unlocking-sustainability-compliance-replication-package.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/fyndalf/unlocking-sustainability-compliance-replication-package.

  7. 7.

    https://llama.meta.com/llama3/ [Accessed: 18/06/2024].

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under grants no. 465904964, 496119880 and 531115272, by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant no. 16DII133 (Weizenbaum Institute), and by the Einstein Foundation Berlin under grant no. EPP-2019-524. Further, the authors would like to thank Man Tuen Chan for his support in validating the approach presented in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of CIT, Technical University of Munich, Heilbronn, Germany

    Finn Klessascheck & Luise Pufahl

  2. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Stephan A. Fahrenkrog-Petersen & Jan Mendling

  3. Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin, Germany

    Finn Klessascheck, Stephan A. Fahrenkrog-Petersen, Jan Mendling & Luise Pufahl

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  1. Finn Klessascheck
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  2. Stephan A. Fahrenkrog-Petersen
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Correspondence to Finn Klessascheck .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    José Borbinha

  2. University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Tiago Prince Sales

  3. Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Miguel Mira Da Silva

  4. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Henderik A. Proper

  5. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Marianne Schnellmann

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Klessascheck, F., Fahrenkrog-Petersen, S.A., Mendling, J., Pufahl, L. (2025). Unlocking Sustainability Compliance: Characterizing the EU Taxonomy for Business Process Management. In: Borbinha, J., Prince Sales, T., Da Silva, M.M., Proper, H.A., Schnellmann, M. (eds) Enterprise Design, Operations, and Computing. EDOC 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15409. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78338-8_18

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