A Method Based on Petri Nets for Identification of Aspects
Vahdat Abdelzad, Fereidoon Shams Aliee · 2010
One of the important factors in creating complexity in software systems is the existence of crosscutting concerns. The concept of aspect orientation with presentation of a method could modulate crosscutting concerns into the single unit that is called aspect, and solve many problems which are created such as tangling and scattering. However, identification and specification of crosscutting concerns and regarding them as aspects is not easy. For this reason, various methods are presented but such methods are informal. In this paper, we propose a formal method based on Petri Nets for identification of aspects. In the method, a software system is expressed in terms of a number of concerns. A concern is composed of one or several requirements which realization of them cause realization of that concern. The proposed method defines requirements and concerns in the formal form by Petri Nets and named them as requirement nets and concern nets. Concern nets with dependencies which there are between requirement nets, model the final system. The execution of final modeled software system based on Petri Nets and monitoring its transitions, shows crosscutting concerns which are candidate aspects.