Towards a Common Reference Architecture for Aspect-Oriented Modeling

Aspect-orientation provides a new way of modularization by clearly separating crosscutting concerns from non-crosscutting ones. Although 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, some approaches already exist for dealing with aspect-orientation at the modeling level. Nevertheless, concepts from the programming level are often simply reused without proper adaptation. Consequently, such approaches fall short in considering the full spectrum of modeling concepts. This paper takes a first step towards a consolidated and more comprehensive view on aspect-orientation by discussing a common reference architecture for aspect-oriented modeling. This reference architecture identifies the basic ingredients of aspect-orientation which in turn are abstracted from specific aspect-oriented programming languages and modeling approaches.