Developing Reactive Systems with Statecharts

Speakers: Simon Van Mierlo and Hans Vangheluwe

Abstract:

Statecharts, introduced by David Harel in 1987, is a formalism used to specify the behaviour of timed, autonomous and reactive systems 
using a discrete-event abstraction. 
It is an extension of Timed Finite State Automata which adds depth, orthogonality, broadcast communication and history. 
Its visual representation is based on higraphs, which combine graphs and Venn diagrams. 
Many tools offer visual editing, simulation and code synthesis support for the Statecharts formalism. 
Examples include STATEMATE, Rhapsody, Yakindu, and Stateflow, each implementing different variants
of Harel's original Semantics. This tutorial introduces Statecharts modelling, simulation, and testing. 
As a running example, the behaviour of a traffic light, a simple timed, autonomous and reactive system is modelled. 
We start from the basic concepts of states and transitions and explain the more advanced concepts of Statecharts by 
extending the example incrementally. We discuss several semantics variants, such as STATEMATE and Rhapsody. 
We use Yakindu to model the example system.

Length: half day

Biography:

Simon Van Mierlo is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). 
He is a member of the Modelling, Simulation and Design (MSDL) research lab. During his PhD thesis, he developed debugging techniques 
for modelling and simulation formalisms by explicitly modelling their operational semantics using Statecharts. 
He is the main developer and maintainer of SCCD, a hybrid formalism that combines Statecharts with Class Diagrams.

Hans Vangheluwe is a Professor at the University of Antwerp (Belgium), and an Adjunct Professor at McGill University (Canada). 
He heads the Modelling, Simulation and Design (MSDL) research lab distributed over both locations. 
In a variety of projects, often with industrial partners, he develops and applies the model-based theory and techniques of Multi-Paradigm Modelling (MPM). 
His current interests are in domain-specific modelling and simulation, including the development of graphical user interfaces for multiple platforms. To model such reactive systems, he advocates the use of Statecharts to describe their behaviour.
He is co-founder and chair of the European COST Action IC1404 "Multi-Paradigm Modelling for Cyber-Physical Systems" (MPM4CPS).
