Weaving Aspects and Business Processes through Model Transformation

International audienceConcerns such as logging, auditing and accounting need to be addressed already in the business process modeling phase and not only in the process implementation phase. Mostly, such concerns are modeled as part of the normal flow in business process models. However, the crosscutting nature of such concerns leads to complex, scattered, and tangled models that are hard to understand and to manage. The lack of appropriate means to modularize crosscutting concerns in business process modeling languages seriously affects understandability, maintainability and reusability. In a previous work we proposed AO4BPMN 1.0 as an aspect-oriented extension of BPMN that allows the modularization of crosscutting concerns. However, there were several open issues in that proposal. First, it lacks a concrete weaving mechanism for composing business processes and aspects. Second, it lacks a well-defined pointcut language to select join points. Third, it does not support BPMN 2.0, which was still under development at that time. In this paper we tackle these issues and present a weaver for AO4BPMN based on model transformation as well as an OCL-based pointcut language