Detection and resolution of aspect interactions in workflows

Workflow systems have become a popular means of automating processes in many domains. Current workflow languages, however, provide only limited modularization mechanisms, and thus suffer from a lack of separation of concerns. Inspired by aspect-oriented research, several extensions to workflow languages have been developed which allow modularizing workflow concerns into separate aspects. Unfortunately, these extensions suffer from similar feature interaction problems as general-purpose aspect-oriented programming languages. In previous work, we have outlined a strategy for managing such interactions. This technical report extends and applies these ideas to workflows. Control flow policies are specified using high-level predicates, and are verified by translating both these predicates and the workflows on which they are specified to DFAs. By computing the intersection between a policy DFA and a workflow DFA, we can determine whether a given policy holds for a given workflow.