#30 Paul Tarvydas on Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems

Paul Tarvydas will be presenting “Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems” by David Harel.

The paper is relevant in an emerging world where “everything is smart” and distributed.

The paper shows/discusses composition (as opposed to inheritance), orthogonal states and parallelism. It uses a running example - that of reverse-engineering a complicated digital watch - to illustrate the various diagrammatic notations explored in the paper. This paper shows how to overcome the “state explosion” problem and makes it practical to use state machines in software design and construction.

Paper link: https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/seoc/2005_2006/resources/statecharts.pdf

Paul Tarvydas is a P.Eng (EE) and has run a software consultancy for some 25+ years specializing in embedded systems, startups, leap-frog technologies, etc. Paul is acknowledged in “Eiffel: The Language” (Bertrand Meyer).

Paul is now focused on his main interest: joining simple technologies together to allow Engineering of systems, expression of design intent, and Diagrams-as-Syntax.