Skip to main content

A light-weight formalism for the specification of reactive systems

  • Contributed Papers
  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
SOFSEM'96: Theory and Practice of Informatics (SOFSEM 1996)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1175))

Abstract

Statecharts are a visual specification mechanism for reactive, embedded systems. They are implemented in commercial tools like Statemate. However, some syntactic constructs impede the modular system specification and have a confusing semantics. We have developed Mini-Statecharts, a lean version of Statecharts. Mini-Statecharts are restricted to the most important syntactic elements of Statecharts but are nevertheless powerful enough to specify complex systems. In this contribution, we extend the core language with local variables and integer-valued signals to avoid state explosion. We show that the formal semantics of the core language smoothly carries over to the semantics of the extended language.

This work is partially funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the compound project “KorSys”.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. M. Broy. Interaction Refinement — The Easy Way. In Program Design Calculi, volume 118 of NATO ASI Series F: Computer & System Sciences. Springer, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  2. D. Harel. Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems. Science of Computer Programming, 8:231–274, 1987.

    Google Scholar 

  3. D. Harel. Statemate: A working environment for the development of complex reactive systems. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 16:403–413, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  4. D. Harel and A. Naamad. The STATEMATE Semantics of Statecharts. Submitted to: ACM Transations Software Engineering Methods, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  5. J.J.M. Hooman, S. Ramesh, and W.P.de Roever. A compositional axiomatization of statecharts. Theoretical Computer Science, 101:289–335, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  6. i-Logix Inc. Languages of Statemate, i-Logix Inc., 22 Third Avenue, Burlington, Mass. 01803, U.S.A., January 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  7. F. Maraninchi. Operational and compositional semantics of synchronous automaton compositions. volume 630 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 550–564. Springer-Verlag, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  8. D. Nazareth, F. Regensburger, and P. Scholz. Mini-Statecharts: A Lean Version of Statecharts. Technical Report TUM-I9610, Technische Universität München, D-80290 München, 1996. Also available in the WWW: http://www4.informatik.tumuenchen.de/reports/TUM-I9610.html.

    Google Scholar 

  9. P. Scholz. An Extended Version of Mini-Statecharts. Technical Report TUM-I9628, Technische Universität München, D-80290 München, 1996. Also available in the WWW: http://www4.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/reports/TUM-I9628.html.

    Google Scholar 

  10. P. Scholz, D. Nazareth, and F. Regensburger. Mini-Statecharts: A Compositional Way to Model Parallel Systems. 1996. To Appear in: PDCS'96.

    Google Scholar 

  11. M. von der Beeck. A comparison of statecharts variants. volume 863 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 128–148. Springer, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  12. G. Winskel. The Formal Semantics of Programming Languages. The MIT Press, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Keith G. Jeffery Jaroslav Král Miroslav Bartošek

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Scholz, P. (1996). A light-weight formalism for the specification of reactive systems. In: Jeffery, K.G., Král, J., Bartošek, M. (eds) SOFSEM'96: Theory and Practice of Informatics. SOFSEM 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1175. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0037426

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0037426

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61994-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49588-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics