Paper: On the Formal Semantics of Statecharts (Extended Abstract) (at LICS 1987)

Authors: David Harel Amir Pnueli Jeanette P. Schmidt Rivi Sherman

Abstract

Statecharts have been introduced recently as a visual formalism for specifying the behavior of complex reactive systems. They extend classical state transition diagrams in several ways, while retaining, and even enhancing, their visual appeal. In particular, statecharts cater for hierarchical descriptions, high-level and low-level events, and notably, multi-level concurrency with a broadcast communication mechanism that can give rise to chain-reaction effects. In this paper we provide a formal syntax and (operational) semantics for statecharts. The semantics appears to be novel in a number of ways, among which are its treatement of shared variables, chain reactions and simultaneous multiple messages.

BibTeX

  @InProceedings{HarelPnueliSchmidtS-OntheFormalSemantic,
    author = 	 {David Harel and Amir Pnueli and Jeanette P. Schmidt and Rivi Sherman},
    title = 	 {On the Formal Semantics of Statecharts (Extended Abstract)},
    booktitle =  {Proceedings of the Second Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 1987)},
    year =	 {1987},
    month =	 {June}, 
    pages =      {54--64},
    location =   {Ithaca, NY, USA}, 
    publisher =	 {IEEE Computer Society Press}
  }