Static weaving in aspect oriented business process management

Abstract

Separation of concerns is an important topic in business process modelling that aims to reduce complexity, increase the re-usability and enhance the maintainability of business process models. Some concerns cross over several business processes (known as cross-cutting concerns), and they hinder current modularization techniques to encapsulate them efficiently. Aspect Oriented Business Process Modelling aims to encapsulate these concerns from business process models. Although many researchers proposed different aspect-oriented business process modelling approaches, there is no analysis technique to check these models in terms of soundness. Thus, this paper proposes a formal definitions and semantics for aspect-oriented business process models, and it enables the analysis of these models in terms of soundness at design time through defining a static weaving algorithm. The algorithm is implemented as an artefact that support weaving aspect-oriented business process models. The artefact is used to analyse different scenarios, and the result of analysis reveals the situations that can introduce different problems like deadlock. In addition, an example of such scenario is given that shows how the artefact can detect the problems at design time. Such analysis enables process modellers to discover the problems at design time, so the problems will not be left to be discovered at runtime - which apply a lot of costs to correct them.