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Supporting aspect orientation in business process management

From process modelling to process enactment

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Abstract

Coping with complexity is an important issue in both research and industry. One strategy to deal with complexity is separation of concerns, which can be addressed using aspect-oriented paradigm. Despite being well researched in programming, this paradigm is still in a preliminary stage in the area of business process management (BPM). While some efforts have been made to introduce aspect orientation in business process modelling, there is no holistic approach with a formal underlying foundation to support aspect-oriented business process design and enactment, and this gap restricts aspect-oriented paradigm from being practically deployed in the area of BPM. Therefore, this paper proposes a sound systematic approach which builds on a formal syntax for modelling aspect-oriented business processes and a Petri Net-based operational semantics for enacting these processes. The approach enables the implementation of software system artefacts as a proof of concept to support design and enactment of aspect-oriented business processes in practice. The approach is demonstrated using a banking case study, where processes are modelled using a concrete notation that conforms to the proposed formal syntax and then executed in a state-of-the-art BPM system where the implemented artefacts are deployed.

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Notes

  1. Artefacts are defined as objects made by humans with the intention that it be used to address a practical problem [32].

  2. We adopt this common approach in our paper.

  3. BPMN stands for Business Process Model and Notation (http://www.bpmn.org/).

  4. YAWL stands for Yet Another Workflow Language (http://www.yawlfoundation.org/).

  5. http://www.workflowpatterns.com/.

  6. Full details of the model and the results of simulation and state-space analysis are publicly available and can be downloaded from http://www.aobpm.com.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to Mr. Saman Mesgari for his valuable help in the case study. Moreover, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that helped us to improve the paper. This work is partially supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant with number DP120101624.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stockholm University, Forum 100, 164 40, Kista, Sweden

    Amin Jalali, Petia Wohed & Paul Johannesson

  2. Queensland University of Technology, Room503, 126 Margaret Street, Brisbane, Australia

    Chun Ouyang

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  1. Amin Jalali
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Correspondence to Amin Jalali.

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Communicated by Prof. Dragan Milicev.

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Jalali, A., Ouyang, C., Wohed, P. et al. Supporting aspect orientation in business process management. Softw Syst Model 16, 903–925 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-015-0496-7

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