A Concise Compositionalj Statecharts Semantics Definition

Statecharts is a well-known specification language for modeling system behavior. Its intuitive graphical appeal for specifying hierarchical, concurrent state machines conceals the difficulties in formalizing its semantics. The causes are in Statecharts’ two-level semantics when demanding compositionality, as is necessary in order to obtain easy comprehensibility and modularity of system specifications. This paper suggests a compositional approach for formalizing the Statecharts semantics directly on sequences of micro steps using labeled transition systems as semantical domain. Though we consider causality, global consistency, as well as the synchrony hypothesis, our approach results in a very short and concise semantics definition of Statecharts.

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