Modeling and integrating aspects with UML activity diagrams

Dealing with crosscutting concerns has been a critical problem in software development processes. Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) provides a viable programming-level solution by separating crosscutting concerns from primary concerns. To facilitate handling crosscutting concerns at earlier software development phases, this paper proposes an aspect-oriented modeling and integration approach at the design level. In our approach, primary concerns are depicted with UML activity diagrams as primary models, whereas crosscutting concerns are described with aspectual extended activity diagrams as aspect models. Each aspect model consists of pairs of pointcut and advice model. Aspect models can be integrated into primary models automatically. To this end, a prototype tool called Jasmine-AOI has been implemented as an Eclipse plug-in. With the tool support, we have conducted two case studies, including 15 primary models and 8 aspect models. The case studies demonstrate that our approach can greatly facilitate reasoning about crosscutting concerns when a system is modeled with activity diagrams.