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Abstract:

Complex systems are often reactive, i.e., they continuously respond to external and internal stimuli (events) and may have time constraints. When modeling such systems, the designer should be able to determine the system's behavior, as well as its flow of control. One common way for expressing control flows is via Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules [1]. These rules specify for each action (process) its triggering event and its guarding condition. The action is executed when the triggering event occurs, if and only if the guarding condition is fulfilled at that time. In this paper, we specify how two modeling approaches, Statecharts and Object-Process Methodology (OPM), model the ECA paradigm and compare the expressive power of the respective models. We examine the types of supported events, how these event types are integrated into complete system specifications, and what are the potential implications on the code derived from each one of the specifications. Statecharts [3] is an extension of the conventional formalism of state machines and diagrams. It can be used either as a stand-alone behavioral description or as part of a more general analysis and design method, such as UML [5]. Statecharts is based on states, which specify a situation in which a system (or an object) exists, and transitions, which enable the

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