Formalization of an Aspect-Oriented Modeling Approach

Aspect-oriented programming offers special concepts, such as advices and join points, to implement crosscutting concerns which are activated at various points throughout a program, therefore modifying its base behavior. This article presents a high-level aspect-oriented modeling approach and shows how it can be formalized to allow the verification of aspect composition. Models written in Aspect-UML (our UML profile) are translated into COOPN/2 Petri nets, whose corresponding state graphs can be formally verified by model-checking.