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The aspect‐oriented paradigm provides mechanisms to modularize crosscutting concerns. Applying aspect‐oriented concepts in business process modeling raises the possibilities of modularization, but brings out several concerns related both to process and to product. This paper aims to provide an overview of the aspect‐oriented business process modeling area, point out the open issues and analyze possible solutions to such issues.

This paper is based on a research project, where real business process models from a large oil and gas organization were analyzed, re‐modeled and re‐analyzed to put the AO‐BPM approach in practice.

The paper indicates the need for more research on aspect‐orientation applied to business process models, backed by open issues that are faced in this research. The authors categorized the open issues as: aspects identification, elements used in the models, levels used to modularize business process models, assignment of aspects to organizational actors, and ways that an aspectized model can be generated or visualized. The authors listed initial thoughts on possible solutions that they foresee based on previous work in software engineering.

This paper is the first one in analyzing research questions facing AO‐BPM. By now there have just been papers focusing on presenting its understanding on how to apply the aspect‐orientation approach to solve business process models modularity issues as can be seen in the related works section. The paper's main contribution is making explicit the roadblocks that are faced and opening up new avenues of research on BPM modularization, in particular with respect to AO‐BPM.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a representation scheme based on the i* strategic actor model to represent the process owner information and show how to incorporate this approach into the event driven process chain and Business Process Modeling Notation-BPMN meta-models and also into the aspect-oriented business process modeling (BPM) context.

The authors use a case study in a real setting to evaluate the proposal and a controlled experiment to get more evidence about its relevance.

The authors presented evidence both from a case study in a real-world library showing the importance of representing – previously unavailable – process owner information, and from an experiment which involved participants analyzing the same models of the case study, confirming the preliminary evidences. It is important to stress the recognition that the proposed representation provided more transparency, in terms of ownership, than the usual BPM models. These benefits are due to the combination of the aspect-oriented approach and the strategic actor model, providing ownership information in a more transparent way.

The authors not only argue the importance of clearly established process ownership, both of the core process and the aspectual process, but also the authors presented an approach to represent the actor involved in process and aspect ownership as an instantiation of the i* strategic actor. Using this approach, the process owner can be defined in terms of actors instead of the activities performed. It is also possible to define the aspect owner and to include the aspectual process concept in the business process model.