Aspect-Oriented Business Process Management (Extended Abstract)

Separation of concerns has long been considered an effective and efficient strategy to deal with complexity in information systems. One sort of concern crosses over other concerns, which makes their management difficult. Aspect Orientation is a paradigm in information systems which aims to encapsulate cross-cutting concerns to overcome this problem. In the Business Process Management (BPM) area, Aspect Oriented Business Process Modeling aims to specify how this technique can support encapsulating cross-cutting concerns in process models. However, it is not clear how these models should be supported in the whole BPM lifecycle. Therefore, this thesis investigates how aspect orientation can be supported over the whole BPM lifecycle. This thesis has been carried out following the design science framework, and the result is presented as a set of artifacts (in the form of constructs, models, methods, and instantiations) and empirical findings. The artifacts support modeling, analysis, implementation/configuration, enactment, monitoring, adjustment, and mining cross-cutting concerns while supporting business processes using Business Process Management Systems. The use of these artifacts and their application shows that they can reduce the complexity of process models by separating different concerns