Plug-and-play composition of features and feature interactions with statechart diagrams

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach for modular design of highly-entangled software components by statechart diagrams. We structure the components into features, which represent reusable, self-contained services. These are modeled individually by statechart diagrams. For composition of components from features, we need to consider the interactions between the features. These feature interactions, well known in the telecommunications area, typically describe special cases or cooperations which only occur when two features are combined. We describe these interactions graphically by refinement relations between statecharts. The main novelty is that full component descriptions are created in a plug-and-play fashion by combining the statecharts for the required features and interactions. Furthermore, we develop different classes of statecharts and show the interactions on a case-by-case basis. For composition, we use semantic refinement concepts for statecharts which preserve the original behavior.