V5 N1 Paper 3
Annals of the MS in Computer Science and Information Systems at UNC Wilmington
Spring 2011

Implementing a Workflow Management System - Using Aspects  

Ed Peloquin

Committee

Devon Simmonds (chair)
Douglas Kline
Ron Vetter

Abstract

Proper management of the business processes of organizations is central to profitability and survivability. Each business processes executes a sequence of activities and generates output to meet one or more organizational goals. While mapping and executing business processes in software has seen a dramatic increase in demand in recent years, mapping these processes to an execution runtime is a very complicated task. A system that handles this interaction must be able to translate the design time depiction of a process, specify what each business entity does, who is responsible, and validate the results of each process. In many cases, the software must also undergo changes and revisions much like the business processes they handle. When using a standard object oriented approach, these changes can result in a system where crosscutting concerns are more difficult to manage or maintain. Implementing a Workflow Management System using aspect oriented software development techniques, may allow the system to be better equipped to handle crosscutting concerns during the software development lifecycle but retain performance that is on par with a standard object oriented implementation.This project seeks to compare aspect-oriented and object-oriented approaches to the implementation of a workflow management system. To accomplish this goal the project will: (1) develop an object-oriented workflow management system based on the XPDL standard, (2) create an aspect-oriented version of the system by enhancing the system with aspects, and (3) compare the two systems based on execution time, memory usage, and the addition of a crosscutting concern.

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Recommended Citation: Peloquin, E., Simmonds, D, Kline, D., Vetter, R. (2011) Implementing a Workflow Management System - Using Aspects. Annals of the Master of Science in Computer Science and Information Systems at UNC Wilmington, 5(1) paper 3. http://csbapp.uncw.edu/data/mscsis/full.aspx.

V5 N1 Paper 3
Annals of the MS in Computer Science and Information Systems at UNC Wilmington
Spring 2011