On formal semantics of statecharts as supported by STATEMATE

  • Authors:

  • Erich Mikk;Yassine Lakhnech;Carsta Petersohn;Michael Siegel

  • Affiliations:

  • Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Institut für Informatik und Praktische Mathematik, Kiel, Germany;Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Institut für Informatik und Praktische Mathematik, Kiel, Germany;Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Institut für Informatik und Praktische Mathematik, Kiel, Germany;Weizmann Institute of Science, Departement of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Rehovot, Israel

  • Venue:
  • 2FACS'97 Proceedings of the 2nd BCS-FACS conference on Northern Formal Methods
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

We formalize the rigorous but informal description of the semantics of statecharts given by Harel and Naamad in [3] which corresponds to the semantics underlying the commercial tool STATEMATE. We closely follow [3] to increase confidence that our semantics actually corresponds to their informal description. In [3] the semantics is given by a detailed description of the so-called basic step algorithm. Based on a formalization of this basic step algorithm we associate to each statechart a transition system which defines its computations. This is the first step towards linking the language of statecharts as supported by STATEMATE with other automatic verification tools. Our formalization uses Z notation rather than "standard mathematics". This allows to structure the definition of the formal semantics and to use tools like type-checkers.