Prof. Gregor v. Bochmann

Abstract:

After a personal view of the history of state-machine modeling, we will concentrate on three concepts that are important for state-machine modeling and have been taken into account (in one way or another) in the design of related modeling languages: (1) conflict resolution between several system components, (2) message buffering, and (3) the refinement relation used for object-oriented inheritance. We will discuss some historical milestones that contributed to clarifying the related issues and providing solutions to the problems that arise in the context of these three concepts. We will also discuss how these concepts impact dependability engineering, and how they are accommodated in SDL and other specification languages.