Supporting Enactment of Aspect Oriented Business Process Models : an approach to separate cross-cutting concerns in action

Abstract: Coping with complexity in Information Systems and Software Engineering is an important issue in both research and industry. One strategy to deal with this complexity is through a separation of concerns, which can result in reducing the complexity, improving the re-usability, and simplifying the evolution.Separation of concerns can be addressed through the Aspect Oriented paradigm. Although this paradigm has been well researched in the field of programming, it is still in a preliminary stage in the area of Business Process Management. While some efforts have been made to propose aspect orientation for business process modeling, it has not yet been investigated how these models should be implemented, configured, run, and adjusted.Such a gap has restrained the enactment of aspect orientated business process models in practice.Therefore, this research enables the enactment of such models to support the separation of cross-cutting concerns in the entire business process management life-cycle.It starts by defining the operational semantics for the Aspect Oriented extension of the Business Process Model and Notation.The semantics specifies how such models can be implemented and configured, which can be used as a blueprint to support the enactment of aspect oriented business process models.The semantics is implemented in the form of artifacts, which are then used in a banking case study to investigate the current modeling technique.This investigation revealed new requirements, which should be considered in aspect oriented modeling approaches.Thus, the current modeling notation has been extended to include new requirements.The extended notation has been formalized, and investigated through re-modeling the processes in the case study. The results from this investigation show the need to refine the separation rules to support the encapsulation of aspects based on different business process perspectives. Therefore, the new refinement is proposed, formalized, and implemented.The implementation is then used as a prototype to evaluate the result through a case study.