When managing a set of inter-related business processes, typically a number of concerns can be distinguished that are applicable to more than one single process, such as security and traceability. The proper enforcement of these cross-cutting concerns may require a specific configuration effort for each of the business processes involved. Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modelling is an approach that aims at encapsulating these concerns in a model-oriented way. However, state-of-the-art techniques lack efficient mechanisms that allow for the specification of concerns in such a way that they can be executed in parallel to other parts of the process. Moreover, existing techniques exclusively focus on the formulation of mandatory concerns. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a new approach to encapsulate both optional and mandatory concerns, which can be executed concurrently with other process functionalities. One core element of the new approach is that it extends current Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modelling approaches with declarative rules. Thus, this hybrid approach allows for a sophisticated management of cross-cutting concerns.

1. Amin Jalali*, Fabrizio Maria Maggi**, and Hajo A. Reijers***
Stockholm University*, University of Tartu**, VU University Amsterdam*** & Eindhoven University of Technology***
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ER 2015

2. Concerns
 Processes comply to many policies and concerns in
organizations, e.g. money laundering in banking
domain
 Basic questions:
 What are the processes in the organization which
 Should be comply to this specific policy?
 Are actually comply to this specific policy?
 How we can find them?
 How do you handle a change when a policy is altered?
 …
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Does it matter really?
Look at penalties!

3. Separation of concerns
 Separation of concerns
 Modularization Techniques
 Cross-cutting concerns
 E.g. Money laundering policies
 Aspect orientation
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•Complexity •Maintenance •Re-usability
Thesis Examination
Auditing
Course Examination
Archiving
Privacy
Thesis Supervision
Course Supervision
Security
Cross-cutting
concerns:
Core-Concerns:
BusinessProcesses
M
M
Cross-cutting Concerns
(advices)
Core Concern
(main process)
M
Rules
(pointcuts)
AspectOriented
BusinessProcessModel

4. Problem
4
Send Exam
Questions
Print Exam
Materials
Register
Participant List
Register
Grades
Send Fx
Instruction
Deadline
Write Course
Summary
Schedule
The Exam
Register
Students
Submit
Assignments
Join point
Before? After? Around?
Security: Signing Grade registration (every time)
Privacy: Email (every time)
Archive: Scan exam sheets (once)
Archive: Archive Exam Materials (once)
A-E
Fx

5. Approach
 Imperative
 Flow-oriented
 Well-suited to rigid processes
 In a model with no flow, nothing can
happen
 Adding flow allows for additional
possible behaviours
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Declarative workflow, Maja Pesic
Unstructured
(e.g. groupwork)
Structured
(e.g. production workflow)
Support
(provided for
analysis and
guidance)
Flexibility
(ability to defer,
Change and
deliver)
high
low
ImperativeBPM
 Declarative
 Constraint-oriented
 Well-suited to flexible processes
 Hybrid Process Models
 Different parts of the same process may
be more or less flexible.
 Modelling a flexible process imperatively,
or a strict process declaratively, may lead
to incomprehensible models.
 mixing of imperative and declarative
paradigms
DeclarativeBPM
Hybrid
BPM

6. Overall view
6
M
M
Cross-cutting Concerns
(advices)
Core Concern
(main process)
M
Rules
(pointcuts)
AspectOriented
BusinessProcessModel
Imperative
Models
Declarative
Model
Hybrid
Models
 Imperative Models:
 Business process designer can focus on
designing each process model (core
concern) without any knowledge about
cross-cutting concerns
 Cross-cutting concerns, e.g. some
policies, can be encapsulated separately
QuantificationObliviousness
Aspect-Orientation is Quantification and Obliviousness
 Declarative Model:
 Rules can be defined declaratively to
specify when and how cross-cutting
concerns should be considered in core
concerns.

7. Solution
7
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Print Exam
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Send Fx
Instruction
Deadline
Write Course
Summary
Schedule
The Exam
Register
Students
Submit
Assignments
Archiving
Privacy
Security
Initiator = 𝑡𝜖𝑇𝑎𝑠𝑘𝑡 {𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑡}
Terminator = 𝑡𝜖𝑇𝑎𝑠𝑘𝑡 {𝑒𝑛𝑑}
initiator
terminators
Archiving
initiator
I
Register
Grades
T
End
1
3
I
Register
Grades
T
End
2
I
Register
Grades
T
End
A
Grade Registration
Advice
A
Archive
Examination Advice
A
Grade Inform
Advice
4
I
Register
Participant List
T
End
A
Archive Exam
Materials Advice
Tools are essentials to
support Aspect
Orientation
approaches!

8. Extended version
 Includes
 Formal Definition of Syntax and Semantic
 Proof of soundness
 Implementation in YAWL
 Evaluation (usability)
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9. Questions
Thank you ...
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