Goal and Aspect-oriented Business Process Engineering (GAoBPE)

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A business process is a collection of related, structured activities that help achieve particular goals of one or many stakeholders. Many of these activities and processes are nowadays being automated in various domains such as e-commerce, e-health, and e-government. Typical examples include the processing of tax reports or of loan requests, the clinical treatment of cardiac patients, and the admission of university students. Business processes are no longer just being designed, implemented and tested; they are now fully "engineered" with additional modelling, monitoring, and management activities. Although research, tools, and methodologies related to business processes have acquired much maturity in the past decade, they often have a narrow view of processes without proper consideration for alignment with stakeholder objectives and for proper separation of concerns. Recent developments in the software engineering domain can help here: goal modelling is a common approach for ensuring that software and processes are aligned with their objectives, whereas aspect-oriented modelling promotes advanced modularity and reuse. The main objective of this research is to evolve standard-based languages (such as the User Requirements Notation), methodologies and tools for the engineering of business processes in a way that exploits goal alignment and aspect-oriented modularization. These processes will even be monitored against stakeholder objectives in such a way as to adapt automatically to their environment. The benefits and limitations of an approach that combines goals, processes, indicators and aspects for business process engineering will be evaluated in different contexts, from healthcare clinical processes to regulatory compliance. This research will benefit healthcare, financial, and governmental organizations as their business processes and objectives are becoming increasingly formalized and monitored, and having processes adapt automatically to changing contexts will improve the quality and competitiveness of these organizations. Software consultants and tool vendors will also be able to incorporate the results in their services and products.