This paper describes a novel application for Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). By combining the concepts of Business Process Management and AOP, we present an approach for enabling the creation of flexible and dynamic business processes, given a set of aspects defined by the participants in the process. We call this approach AspectOrientated Process Engineering (ASOPE). An example of an application of ASOPE to a commercial problem is given. We evaluate the suitability of AspectJ (the AOP environment that we used) for developing ASOPE-type systems and recommend various changes that we would like to see.
Simon G. Thompson, Brian Odgers