A generic MOF metamodel for aspect-oriented modelling

In recent years, Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) has emerged as a new technology addressing separation of concerns. However this technology has not been widely adopted in real life scenarios mainly due to the lack of a clear AOSD methodology/process, covering all stages of software life-cycle. Currently, there are several aspect-oriented (AO) proposals for aspect-oriented requirements analysis, architectural description, design and implementation. Unfortunately each proposal focuses on specific development stages. We propose to use a Model-Driven Software Development approach, and specifically, Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), the OMG proposal, for the integration of the different AO approaches defined at each development phase, specifying transformations between proposals. MDA transformations are based on MOF (Meta Object Facility) metamodels of source and target models. This paper presents a generic MOF 2.0 metamodel of AO design languages. The elements of this generic metamodel should serve to make the construction of metamodels of current AO design approaches easier by identifying commonalities and promoting reuse.