Foundations of Aspect Oriented Business Process Management

Reducing complexity in Information Systems is a main concern in both research and industry. One strategy for reducing complexity is separation of concerns. This strategy advocates separating various concerns, like security and privacy, from the main concern. It results in less complex, easily maintainable, and more reusable Information Systems. Separation of concerns is addressed through the Aspect Oriented paradigm. This paradigm has been well researched and implemented in programming, where languages such as AspectJ have been developed. However, the research on aspect orientation for Business Process Management is still at its beginning. While some efforts have been made proposing Aspect Oriented Business Process Modelling, it has not yet been investigated how such modelling should be enacted in a Workflow Management System. In this paper, we define a set of requirements that specifies how aspect oriented business process models should be enacted in a Workflow Management System. Furthermore, we design a Coloured Petri Nets model for a service that fulfils these requirements. This service extends the behaviour of a Workflow Management System with support for execution of aspect oriented business process models. The model is verified and validated using state space analysis and scenarios.