Robot navigation in urban environments requires situational reasoning. Given the complexity of the environment and the behavior specified by traffic rules, it is necessary to recognize the current situation to impose the correct traffic rules. In an attempt to manage the complexity of the situational reasoning subsystem, this paper describes a finite state machine model to govern the situationa...

In this paper, a program generator for communication protocol software will be presented. Our program generator takes an extended finite state machine as a domain model and generates a group of C++ classes needed for an implementation. For each state of the FSM, a C++ class is generated, where the interface events are implemented as member functions of the corresponding state object. Protocol d...

One of the main advantages of the UML is its possibility to model different views on a system using a number of diagram types. The various diagrams can be used to specify different aspects and their combination together makes up the complete system description. This does, however, always pose the question of consistency: it may well be the case that the designer has specified contradictory requ...

With increasing sizes of designs and the need for low power applications, power is another optimization constraint that has become critical in addition to timing and area for electronic circuits. The work presented in this paper exploits a fundamental and important source of power reduction – shutting down useless parts of a sequential circuit. This idea is known as power management. In our app...

Companies continuously look for ways to improve their processes and cut costs using new technologies. Model-based testing (MBT) is a technology that has the potential to be such a cost saver. In this paper, we present a case study in which we compare manual testing processes with MBT processes based on finite state machine (FSM) models. The system under test (SUT) is a professionally developed ...

Computing was originally dominated by desktop and hence dataoriented systems. However, embedded and hence time-oriented systems, which must measure input events or generate output events of specified time durations, or must execute at regular time intervals, are increasingly commonplace. Blinking a light on and off for 1 second represents a “Hello World” example of a time-oriented system. Time-...

The trace assertion method is a formal state machine based method for specifying module A module interface speciication treats the module as a black-box, identifying all module's access programs (i.e. programs that can be invoked from outside of the module), and describing their externally visible eeects. A formal model for the trace assertion method is proposed. The concept of step-traces is i...

UML state machines are widely used to specify dynamic systems behaviours. However its semantics is described informally, thus preventing the application of model checking techniques that could guarantee the system safety. In a former work, we proposed a formalisation of non-concurrent UML state machines using coloured Petri nets, so as to allow for formal verification. In this paper, we report ...

Computing was originally dominated by desktop and hence dataoriented systems. However, embedded and hence time-oriented systems, which must measure input events or generate output events of specified time durations, or must execute at regular time intervals, are increasingly commonplace. Blinking a light on and off for 1 second represents a “Hello World” example of a time-oriented system. Time-...

We describe a computational model of observational learning inspired by the overlapping cortical activations during execution and observation in primates. For this reason we implement cognitive processes that are known to participate in motor control and investigate how they can be employed during observation. Liquid State Machines are extensively used for the implementation of the model’s neur...