Statecharts Via Process Algebra

Statecharts is a visual language for specifying the behavior of reactive systems. The language extends nite-state machines with concepts of hierarchy, concurrency, and priority. Despite its popularity as a design notation for embedded systems, precisely de ning its semantics has proved extremely challenging. In this paper, a simple process algebra, called Statecharts Process Language (SPL), is presented, which is expressive enough for encoding Statecharts in a structure-preserving and semantics-preserving manner. It is established that the behavioral relation bisimulation, when applied to SPL, preserves Statecharts semantics.