Specifying and Verifying Aspect-Oriented Systems in Rewriting Logic

Aspect-oriented (AO) systems have to deal with an important problem which is the management of aspect interaction. In this paper, we introduce a first tool, known as AO-Maude, which is based on Maude language for the specification and the verification of the AO systems. The proposed tool relies on the reflection feature of rewriting logic that allows us to represent in the Meta-Level the structure of the base system, aspects and the weaver mechanism. The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we provide a support for the specification of the AO systems in Maude language and thus discharge the user from the task of the definition of the weaver mechanism each time. Second, our extension offers a support to the AO systems in Maude while managing the aspect interaction problem in general and the scheduling problem in particular. The proposed tool is illustrated with a concrete case study.