Aspect-Oriented Modeling of Business Processes

Concerns such as compliance, auditing, business activity monitoring or accounting need to be addressed in the early stages of modeling and not only at the implementation or execution levels. Mostly, such concerns are modeled as part of the normal flow in business process models. However, the crosscutting nature of such concerns leads to scattered and tangled models. When we try to model business processes that require support for some of these concerns they quickly become complex and cumbersome to understand and manage. The lack of appropriate means to modularize crosscutting concerns in process modeling languages seriously affects understandability, maintainability and reusability. AO4BPMN 1.0 is an aspect-oriented extension of BPMN that facilitates the modularization of crosscutting concepts in BPMN models such as separation of duties, billing or monitoring. However, there are several open issues and decisions in AO4BPMN 1.0. First, there is no concrete pointcut language defined. Second, no weaving mechanism is provided to compose aspects and processes. Third the language is based on an old BPMN version and the respective editor is based on the STP BPMN editor, which is no longer developed. In this thesis we refine AO4BPMN into its 2.0 version by defining a concrete OCL-based pointcut language. Thereby we provide extension points to allow integrating other pointcut languages. In addition, we define and implement a weaving mechanism to compose aspects and processes. In addition, we adapt AO4BPMN to the new BPMN 2.0 standard and provide an Eclipse-based editor supporting our extension.