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

TL;DR

This paper explores how to automatically assess business process compliance with the EU sustainability taxonomy using a few-shot learning approach with large language models, aiding companies in regulatory adherence.

Contribution

It introduces a novel few-shot learning pipeline leveraging LLMs to characterize taxonomy constraints for conformance checking in business processes.

Findings

Many taxonomy constraints are applicable for conformance checking.

Energy, manufacturing, and transport sectors show higher feasibility.

The approach helps companies identify necessary data for compliance monitoring.

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.