A graph theoretic semantics for viewcharts

Abstract

Most of current methods for systems behavioral specifications are suitable only for small systems. Behavioral requirements engineering of large-scale software systems using current Formal Description Techniques (FDT), is complex and difficult. In general, when the scale of the system grows linearly, the number of states (in FSM-based methods) grow exponentially. Therefore, much research continues on introducing new techniques for eliminating (or at least reducing) this problem.The introduction of Viewcharts is a considerable step in this direction. Work on the semantics of Viewcharts, however, is limited to its semantics via translations to Statecharts. We believe that due to the visual nature of the Viewcharts formalism, a graph theory based semantics is more suitable to establish a sound foundation for the formalism. Furthermore, since FSMs are more established and have stronger foundation than Statecharts, we prefer an FSM-based semantics. In this paper we provide a semantics for Viewcharts based on solely FSMs and graph theory.