A compositional approach to statecharts semantics

Gerald Lüttgen, Michael von der Beeck, Rance Cleaveland

Abstract

Statecharts is a visual language for specifying reactive system behavior. The formalism extends traditional finite-state machines with notions of hierarchy and concurrency, and it is used in many popular software design notations. A large part of the appeal of Statecharts derives from its basis in state machines, with their intuitive operational interpretation. The classical semantics of Statecharts, however, suffers from a serious defect; it is not compositional, meaning that the behavior of system descriptions cannot be inferred from the behavior of their subsystems. Compositionality is a prerequisite for exploiting the modular structure of Statecharts for simulation, verification, and code generation, and it also provides the necessary foundation for reusability.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Luettgen-al:FSE00,
  author    = {Gerald L{\"{u}}ttgen and
               Michael von der Beeck and
               Rance Cleaveland},
  title     = {A compositional approach to statecharts semantics},
  booktitle = {FSE},
  pages     = {120--129},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2000},
}

A compositional approach to statecharts semantics

Abstract

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