Enhancing Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modeling with Declarative Rules

Abstract

When managing a set of inter-related business processes, typically a number of concerns can be distinguished that are applicable to more than one single process, such as security and traceability. The proper enforcement of these cross-cutting concerns may require a specific configuration effort for each of the business processes involved. Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modelling is an approach that aims at encapsulating these concerns in a model-oriented way. However, state-of-the-art techniques lack efficient mechanisms that allow for the specification of concerns in such a way that they can be executed in parallel to other parts of the process. Moreover, existing techniques exclusively focus on the formulation of mandatory concerns. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a new approach to encapsulate both optional and mandatory concerns, which can be executed concurrently with other process functionalities. One core element of the new approach is that it extends current Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modelling approaches with declarative rules. Thus, this hybrid approach allows for a sophisticated management of cross-cutting concerns.