HiLA: high-level aspects for UML state machines

  • Authors:
  • Gefei Zhang;Matthias Hölzl

  • Affiliations:
  • Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München;Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

  • Venue:
  • MODELS'09 Proceedings of the 2009 international conference on Models in Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

UML state machines are widely used for modeling software behavior. However, state-crosscutting behaviors, such as execution history dependence or synchronization (either within a single state machine or between different concurrently active state machines) are hard to model as their realizations are dispersed throughout the state machine or even several state machines. We present High-Level Aspects (HiLA) for UML state machines to address this problem. The HiLA language facilitates modeling cross-cutting behaviors in one single place and separately from the base machines, and thus improves the modularity of the software design. It provides facilities for specifying multiple history-dependent and concurrent aspects that extend the behavior of base machines in a straightforward, mostly declarative style; it therefore allows the designer to build models at a high level of abstraction. Furthermore, HiLA provides aspects that constrain or modify the interactions between multiple independent state machines.