Formalization of UML-Statecharts

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has gained wide acceptance in very short time because of its variety of well-known and intuitive graphical notations. However, this comes at the prize of an unprecise and incomplete semantics definition. This insufficiency concerns single UML diagram notations on their own as well as their integration. In this paper, we focus on the notation of UML-Statecharts. Starting with a precise textual syntax definition, we develop quite a concise structured operational semantics (SOS) for UML-Statecharts based on labeled transition systems. Besides the support of interlevel transitions and in contrast to related work, our semantics definition supports characteristic UMLStatechart features like the history mechanism as well as entry and exit actions.