Assessing Aspect Oriented Approaches in Business Process Management

Separation of concerns is an important topic in Business Process Modeling. One sort of concerns is cross-cutting, like security, which are repeated in many business processes. These concerns make the models more complex, since concerns are repeated in many process models. The repetition of realization of concerns in process models makes the maintenance cumbersome. Aspect Oriented Business Process Modeling is an approach to address these concerns, which has been investigated recently. However, no set of requirements are defined for such modeling proposals, which makes the evaluation of and comparison between these approaches impossible. Therefore, this paper introduces a set of requirements for the aspect oriented business process modeling, which are used to define an evaluation framework for assessing these modeling approaches. The framework is used to evaluate existing aspect oriented business process modeling proposals. The result shows a comparison between different modeling proposals by clarifying their strengths and weaknesses. It also shows the gap in the area, which can be used as direction for future research.