Statecharts are one of the most popular formalisms to model the behavior of reactive systems and are especially used in cyber-physical systems. Following common step-wise refinement strategies, modelers often develop and evolve Statecharts models incrementally to satisfy requirements and changes. Typically, modelers start with a more abstract model that satisfies important properties. They then refine the model gradually by introducing detail in steps that are guaranteed to preserve the important properties. The literature is rich with Statecharts refinement approaches, where the main concern is to preserve the behavior of the original model. However, they provide insufficient guarantees that the structure of the original model is preserved after refinement. This reduces the practicality of applying refinements: the structure of a Statecharts model encodes design decisions that developers must properly maintain.
展开▼
