RESEARCH PAPER Implementation of Aspect-oriented Business Process Models with Web Services Hercules Sant Ana da Silva Jose • Claudia Cappelli • Flavia Maria Santoro • Leonardo Guerreiro Azevedo Received: 29 September 2018 / Accepted: 24 January 2020 / Published online: 17 March 2020 Ó Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2020 Abstract In software development, crosscutting concerns, such as security, audit, access control, authentication, logging, persistence, transaction, error handling etc. can be modularized using the aspect-oriented paradigm. In busi- ness process modeling, aspects have been used to reduce visualization complexity, increase reuse and improve model maintainability. There are techniques which address aspects in modeling and implementation phases of business process; however, these techniques adopt different semantic representations, hindering the integration of these phases into the BPM lifecycle. This work proposes an architecture for service discovery capable of selecting web services that implement crosscutting concerns and meet the goals established in the aspect modeling phase, executing them accordingly with a prioritization. A proof of concept to analyze the proposed architecture and generated artifacts was performed. Afterwards, the proposal was evaluated by means of an experiment. The results suggest that the def- inition of an operational goal enables the business spe- cialists to concentrate on the modeling of the aspect without necessarily concerning its implementation, since a proper option for implementation is discovered during the execution of the process. Keywords Business process management Á Aspect orientation Á Semantics Á Automatic discovery of services Á Aspect-oriented modeling in business process Á WSMO 1 Introduction The aspect-oriented paradigm (Kiczales et al. 1997) brings several advantages for software development, such as the reduction of scattered codes, transparency of the respon- sibilities of each module, and independence of modules, as well as facilitating the application evolution with low coupling between the modules, and the code reusability. The business process management (BPM) community has been actively studying the application of this paradigm in all phases of the BPM life cycle in order to modularize crosscutting concerns that are scattered and tangled within process models (Cappelli et al. 2010; Charfi et al. 2010; Jalali 2011; Jalali et al. 2015). In the process modeling, aspects and their components are represented by visual elements that facilitate the understanding of the model by business experts and stakeholders. Examples are the works of Cappelli et al. (2010) and Charfi et al. (2010) that use the concepts of aspects in the modeling phase, aiming to facilitate the understanding of process models. Yet, in the process implementation phase, the aspects are related to technical Accepted after two revisions by Jo ¨rg Becker. H. S. Ana da S. Jose (&) Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State (UNIRIO), Avenida Pasteur, 458 – Urca, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil e-mail: hercules.jose@uniriotec.br C. Cappelli Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Avenida Athos da Silveira Ramos, 274 – Cidade Universita ´ria, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil e-mail: claudia.cappelli@gmail.com F. M. Santoro University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), Rua Sa ˜o Francisco Xavier, 524 – Maracana ˜, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil e-mail: flaviamariasantoro@gmail.com L. G. Azevedo IBM Research, Avenida Pasteur 138/146 – Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil e-mail: lga@br.ibm.com 123 Bus Inf Syst Eng 62(6):561–584 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-020-00643-2