Complexity is a major concern which is aimed to be overcome by people through modelling. One way of reducing complexity is separation of concerns, e.g. separation of business process from applications. One sort of concerns are cross-cutting concerns i.e. concerns which are scattered and tangled through one or several models. In business process management, examples of such concerns are security and privacy policies. To deal with these cross-cutting concerns, the aspect orientated approach was introduced in the software development area and recently also in the business process management area. The work presented in this paper elaborates on aspect oriented process modelling. It extends earlier work by defining a mechanism for capturing multiple concerns and specifying a precedence order according to which they should be handled in a process. A formal syntax of the notation is presented precisely capturing the extended concepts and mechanisms. Finally, the relevance of the approach is demonstrated through a case study.

Monitoring business processes is an important area in Business Process Management. This area not only supports monitoring but also enables flexibility. Thus, it has been investigated in many other areas like Business Activity Monitoring, Exception Handling, Aspect Oriented Business Process Management, etc. These areas require to define how a process instance should be monitored from different perspectives. However, current definitions are coupled to control-flow perspective, which applies some limitations. For example, we cannot define a rule to capture situations in which an account balance is read - regardless of its process. To capture such situations, we propose an approach to define monitoring rules. This approach enables composition of rules in a way to be decoupled from a specific perspective. To validate the result, we implemented a rule editor and a monitoring service, called Observer Service. These artefacts are used to support the definition of monitoring rules and track process instances, correspondingly. Finally, we investigated the validity and relevancy of the artefacts through a banking case study.

Automatic discovery of process models from event logs is an important and promising area in Business Process Management. Process models document how business processes should be performed, so they capture different concerns related to business processes. Some of these concerns are not limited to one process model, and they are repeated in many others as well, called cross-cutting concerns. Although many works have been done to enable discovering different process models, there is no investigation about how models with cross-cutting concerns can be discovered from even logs. Therefore, this work proposes an approach to enable discovering these models from event logs. The investigation is performed based on a case-study from the banking domain. The result shows how these concerns hinder existing process discovery techniques, and how the proposed approach can solve the problem.

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.

Separation of concerns has long been an important strategy in the software systems development to cope with the complexity embedded in such systems. The same type of concerns, like security concerns, is often repeated in many modules of a system, which hinders the consistency, re-usability, change and maintenance of the system. Aspect orientation aims to separate and encapsulate these concerns to solve the complexity problem. This paper introduces the use of aspect orientation for case and adaptive case management through changing the rules that govern business processes on the fly. It introduces a taxonomy of such rules based on the declarative workflows approach. It also shows how so-called form-based case management systems could be extended to support aspect orientation to reduce the complexity problem.

The traditional way of business process development is via creating a detailed model of a business process in question, acquiring an IT-system to support it, and then implementing it in the organizational practice. Acquiring a system can be done via designing and manufacturing it by the business itself, or via commissioning it to somebody else. Alternatively, a generic system can be bought and configured according to the business process model created. The traditional approach has a number of risks that become visible only during the latest phase of introducing the system in the organizational practice, e.g., when it becomes clear that the system does not fit the business and/or people who work in it. These risks could be mitigated by using an agile approach to the development of business processes. In agile approach: (a) the phases of process modeling, IT-system design, and manufacturing are merged into one, and (b) instead of using one big cycle, a series of smaller development cycles is used. The paper discusses what is needed to implement the agile approach, and in which business situations the agile approach is the most appropriate. Examples of tools to support agile development are presented and analyzed. The results presented in the paper have been achieved based on the knowledge transformation perspective along the lines suggested by Nonaka in SECI model. The modification of this model has been used to understand the risks and requirements connected to a particular process development strategy.

Separation of concerns is an important topic in business process modelling that aims to reduce complexity, increase the re-usability and enhance the maintainability of business process models. Some concerns cross over several business processes (known as cross-cutting concerns), and they hinder current modularization techniques to encapsulate them efficiently. Aspect Oriented Business Process Modelling aims to encapsulate these concerns from business process models. Although many researchers proposed different aspect-oriented business process modelling approaches, there is no analysis technique to check these models in terms of soundness. Thus, this paper proposes a formal definitions and semantics for aspect-oriented business process models, and it enables the analysis of these models in terms of soundness at design time through defining a static weaving algorithm. The algorithm is implemented as an artefact that support weaving aspect-oriented business process models. The artefact is used to analyse different scenarios, and the result of analysis reveals the situations that can introduce different problems like deadlock. In addition, an example of such scenario is given that shows how the artefact can detect the problems at design time. Such analysis enables process modellers to discover the problems at design time, so the problems will not be left to be discovered at runtime - which apply a lot of costs to correct them.

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 provides 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. The approach is explained, formally grounded with precise semantics, and used accordingly to implement the artefacts that support the enactment of a business process in the proposed fashion. The execution environment is applied to a case from the educational domain to demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the underlying concepts.

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.