Statecharts: A visual formalism for complex systems
Science of Computer Programming
On the development of reactive systems
Logics and models of concurrent systems
Executable object modeling with statecharts
Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Software engineering
The STATEMATE semantics of statecharts
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
The Immune System as a Reactive System: Modeling T Cell Activation With Statecharts
HCC '01 Proceedings of the IEEE 2001 Symposia on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC'01)
Spatial modeling in cell biology at multiple levels
Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference
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This paper combines three topics to which Amir Pnueli contributed significantly: the semantics of languages for concurrency, the semantics of statecharts, and reactive and hybrid systems. It is also no accident that the main motivation of our paper comes from biological systems: in recent years Amir became interested in these too. In [KLH10] we introduced Biocharts, a fully executable, two-tier compound visual language for modeling complex biological systems. The high-level part of the language is a version of statecharts, which have been shown to be successful in software and systems engineering. These statecharts can then be combined with any appropriately well-defined language (preferably a diagrammatic one) for specifying the low-level dynamics of the biological pathways and networks. The purpose of [KLH10] was to present the main concepts through a biological example and to illustrate the feasibility and usefulness of the approach. Here we discuss some of the questions that arise when one attempts to provide a careful definition of the semantics of Biocharts. We also compare the main requirements needed in a language for modeling biology with the way statecharts are used in software and system engineering.