A Survey on Aspect-Oriented Modeling Approaches

Aspect-orientation provides a new way of modularization by clearly separating crosscutting concerns from non-crosscutting ones. Al- though originally emerged at the programming level, aspect-orientation meanwhile stretches also over other development phases. Not only due to the rise of model-driven engineering, approaches already exist for deal- ing with aspect-orientation at the modeling level. Nevertheless, concepts from the programming level are often simply reused without proper adap- tation. Consequently, such approaches fall short in considering the full spectrum of modeling concepts not present in programming languages, like, e.g., di®erent views on the application's structure and behavior. In this paper we present a survey on existing aspect-oriented modeling approaches. In doing so, we ¯rst discuss a common reference architecture for aspect-oriented modeling and thus, take a step towards a consolidated and more comprehensive view on aspect-orientation. Second, we set up a framework of evaluation criteria directly derived from the common reference architecture and thus, allowing for a structured evaluation of approaches. And third, we provide a comparison of aspect-oriented mod- eling approaches by means of a running example making the approaches' strengths and shortcomings more explicit and report on lessons learned.