Aspect-Oriented Semantic Framework for Executable Models

Aspect-Oriented Modeling (AOM) has gained a lot of attention from researchers. It emerged as an appropriate paradigm to improve the modularization of crosscutting concerns at the software modeling phase. On the other hand, with the rise of Model-Driven Development, Executable UML (xUML) plays a central role since it allows modelers to specify detailed specifications that can be automatically transformed into code. In this paper, we provide a formal semantics for aspect matching and weaving on xUML models, particularly activity diagrams. The semantics is based on Continuation-Passing Style since it provides a concise and elegant description of aspect-oriented mechanisms. We first consider basic pointcuts. Then, we provide a semantics for the dataflow pointcut, which is useful from a security perspective.