Semantic Differencing of Statecharts for Object-oriented Systems

Imke Drave, Robert Eikermann, Oliver Kautz, Bernhard Rumpe

2019

Abstract

Statecharts are well-suited to describe the behavior of objects in object-oriented systems. Effective statechart evolution analysis for detecting errors and exploring design alternatives requires to reveal the semantic differences from one statechart to another. Previous work has not produced approaches to semantic differencing of statecharts for object-oriented systems. This paper defines a syntax and a semantics for reduced UML/P statecharts and presents an explicit semantics-preserving translation from statecharts to finite automata. This enables to reduce semantic statechart differencing to language inclusion checking between finite automata. The translation is formally defined and proven to be correct. This paper further introduces operators for hiding and matching events to compare statecharts semantically on different levels of abstraction. The result is a sound and complete method for semantic differencing of statecharts and abstraction methods, which ultimately facilitates semantic statechart evolution analysis.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Drave I., Eikermann R., Kautz O. and Rumpe B. (2019). Semantic Differencing of Statecharts for Object-oriented Systems.In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD, ISBN 978-989-758-358-2, pages 274-282. DOI: 10.5220/0007351902740282

in Bibtex Style

@conference{modelsward19,
author={Imke Drave and Robert Eikermann and Oliver Kautz and Bernhard Rumpe},
title={Semantic Differencing of Statecharts for Object-oriented Systems},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD,},
year={2019},
pages={274-282},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0007351902740282},
isbn={978-989-758-358-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD,
TI - Semantic Differencing of Statecharts for Object-oriented Systems
SN - 978-989-758-358-2
AU - Drave I.
AU - Eikermann R.
AU - Kautz O.
AU - Rumpe B.
PY - 2019
SP - 274
EP - 282
DO - 10.5220/0007351902740282