Towards a Composition Process for Aspect-oriented Requirements

In this paper we initiate a discussion of a possible process to compose crosscutting concerns with the concerns they cut across. This process should be regarded as a task of an approach to manage concerns at the requirements level. The main concepts behind this process are those of match point, conflicting aspect, dominant aspect and composition rule. A match point is where one or more crosscutting concerns are applied to a given functional concern (or model element). This information is useful to identify conflicting crosscutting concerns. To resolve conflicts we need to identify dominant crosscutting concerns, i.e. the concerns with higher priority. Finally, the composition rule is defined as a sequential list of simpler compositions of crosscutting concern, some operators and the model element.