Aspect-Oriented Workflow Management: Concepts, Languages, Applications

Current workflow languages and workflow management systems lack support for expressing crosscutting concerns and workflow changes in a modular way. The workflow constructs that implement a crosscutting concern such as monitoring or security cannot be encapsulated in a separate module with a well-defined interface, which leads to complex workflow specifications. Moreover, the lack of a module for encapsulating workflow changes as separate first-class entities makes managing such changes difficult. This book addresses these problems by introducing aspect-oriented workflow languages. It also presents two such languages: AO4BPMN, which extends BPMN and AO4BPEL, which extends BPEL. Both languages enable an aspect-oriented workflow management approach supporting crosscutting concerns from process design to process implementation. Two applications of AO4BPEL are discussed: a process container framework for expressing and enforcing non-functional properties and an aspect-based approach to business rules in BPEL. This book targets IT experts and computer scientists as well as readers with interest in workflow management, web service composition, and aspect-oriented software development.

Dr.-Ing. Anis Charfi studied computer science at Munich University of Technology and then pursued doctoral studies under the supervision of Prof. Mira Mezini at Darmstadt University of Technology. After that, he joined SAP Research in Darmstadt. He authored several papers on Workflow Languages, Web Services, and Software Engineering.