Tabular Notations for State Machine-Based Specifications
Markus Herrmannsdörfer · 2008
The term reactive system describes a sys-tem that needs to continuously react to inputs coming from the environment. Finite state machines are a widely used concept for specifying the behavior of such systems. Since finite state machines allow the rigorous capture of functional aspects of system behavior1, they offer several advantages over informal specifi-cations. For example, they provide the ability to automatically generate code or test cases, and they enable formal verifica-tion and validation (V&V). Generally, a finite state machine is an appropriate rep-resentation when a problem or solution has the following characteristics: