Implementation of Aspect-oriented Business Process Models with Web Services

• Published in: Business & information systems engineering 2020-12, Vol.62 (6), p.561-584
• Main Authors: Jose, Hercules Sant Ana da Silva, Cappelli, Claudia, Santoro, Flavia Maria, Azevedo, Leonardo Guerreiro
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Access control; Business and Management; Business process engineering; Business process management; IT in Business; Maintainability; Modelling; Research Paper; Software development; Web services
• ISSN: 2363-7005; 1867-0202
• DOI: 10.1007/s12599-020-00643-2

In software development, crosscutting concerns, such as security, audit, access control, authentication, logging, persistence, transaction, error handling etc. can be modularized using the aspect-oriented paradigm. In business process modeling, aspects have been used to reduce visualization complexity, increase reuse and improve model maintainability. There are techniques which address aspects in modeling and implementation phases of business process; however, these techniques adopt different semantic representations, hindering the integration of these phases into the BPM lifecycle. This work proposes an architecture for service discovery capable of selecting web services that implement crosscutting concerns and meet the goals established in the aspect modeling phase, executing them accordingly with a prioritization. A proof of concept to analyze the proposed architecture and generated artifacts was performed. Afterwards, the proposal was evaluated by means of an experiment. The results suggest that the definition of an operational goal enables the business specialists to concentrate on the modeling of the aspect without necessarily concerning its implementation, since a proper option for implementation is discovered during the execution of the process.