An Aspect-Oriented Language Based on Product Family Algebra: Aspects Specification and Verification
Qinglei Zhang, Ridha Khédri, Jason Jaskolka · 2011
Aspect-orientation is a promising paradigm for managing the separation of crosscutting concerns and decomposing a system using more than one criterion. This paper proposes an aspect-oriented approach at the feature-modeling level to better handle crosscutting concerns in product families. The implementation of some features of a product family can be inherently scattered over several features or tangled within other features. The development of such features bears the same problems as general crosscutting concerns. The Aspect-oriented paradigm provides an effective means for handling crosscutting concerns. Based on the language of Product Family Algebra (PFA), we present a language AO-PFA (Aspect-Oriented Product Family Algebra) that extends the aspectoriented paradigm to feature modeling. The language provides full facilities for articulating aspects, advices, and pointcuts in feature modeling. Moreover, we present a formal verification technique of aspectual composition in the context of AO-PFA. We define a set of validity criteria for aspects with regard to their corresponding base specifications. The proposed approach enables the detection of dependency, reference, or definition invalid aspects.