SBVR14 — Behavioral Rule Is Violated

Summary:
A fundamental idea in SBVR is that behavioral rules can be broken – that is, violated by people. This idea is intrinsic to the distinction SBVR makes between definitional rules and behavioral rules.

Yet nowhere does SBVR currently provide a means to capture the circumstances under which a particular behavioral rule is actually violated. This represents a critical shortcoming. An exact understanding of such circumstances is needed for any robust treatment of business rules.

Fortunately, the resolution of this issue is quite straightforward – SBVR already has the needed concepts to resolve it. In particular, SBVR already includes the concept of acceptable world, providing the necessary deontic basis for the resolution. Only a single new verb concept is needed, behavioral rule is violated, along with appropriate definition.

A behavioral rule can be imposed on a semantic community that is broader than, or different from, the authority that has business jurisdiction over the rule. For example, many of EU-Rent's behavioral rules are imposed on sub-communities of its employees, but some are imposed on its rental customers (mostly in the terms and conditions of the Rental Contract).
The enforcing authority for a behavioral rule is often, but not always, a sub-community within the authority that has business jurisdiction over the rule – for example, police and courts.
The enforcing authority for a behavioral rule needs to consider three things:
4. What remedial action is needed to address the violation
5. What consequential action may be needed
6. Whether some sanction should be applied to whoever is responsible for the violation
However, these actions are separate from the violation.
For example, EU-Rent has a rule that no rented car may be taken outside the area authorized for its rental. If EU-Rent discovers that the rented car of an open rental is outside the area authorized for the rental, it will apply the following enforcement:
4. EU-Rent will cancel the rental contract.
5. EU-Rent needs to: notify the insurer; advise the renter that the contract is canceled and that they are no longer insured and must not drive the car; recover the car and charge the cost to the renter; etc.
6. EU-Rent could cancel any future rental contracts for the renter, and bar the renter from being an additional driver on current or future rentals.
Since both determining and recording whether or not a behavioral rule has been violated is out of scope for SBVR, the concept ‘behavioral rule is violated’ is added to the list (at the end of the introduction to Clause 23.3 - added by SBVR Issue 19840) of concepts that do not go into an SBVR Content Model exchange document and the SBVR XMI metamodel.