Extending UML for Aspect-Oriented Architecture Modeling

Aspect-Oriented Modeling (AOM) is an important part of Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD). Software architecture design is a high-level abstract description of software system. The traditional software architecture design approaches do not provide an independent mechanism for crosscutting concerns, which will lead to increased maintenance overhead, reduced reuse capability and architectural erosion over the lifetime of a system. Therefore, it is necessary to provide a new mechanism for the crosscutting concerns in the architecture modeling. In this paper, the architectural design phase and Aspect-Oriented (AO) concepts are considered jointly. A proposal is presented which introduces Aspect-Oriented concepts to the software architectural design phase to support Aspect-Oriented Architecture Modeling (AOAM). As a result, we give an example to illustrate the approach.