A Platform Independent Framework for Statecharts Code Generation

Control systems for telescopes and their instruments are reactive systems very well suited to be modelled using Statecharts formalism. The World Wide Web Consortium is working on a new standard called SCXML that specifies XML notation to describe Statecharts and provides a well defined operational semantic for run-time interpretation of the SCXML models. This paper presents a generic application framework for reactive non realtime systems based on interpreted Statecharts. The framework consists of a model to text transformation tool and an SCXML interpreter. The tool generates from UML state machine models the SCXML representation of the state machines as well as the application skeletons for the supported software platforms. An abstraction layer propagates the events from the middleware to the SCXML interpreter facilitating the support for different software platforms. This project benefits from the positive experience gained in several years of development of coordination and monitoring applications for the telescope control software domain using Model Driven Development technologies.