Statecharts: “review”
The idea of statecharts [Harel] is to provide a rich, visual representation for defining finite state machines that capture the essence of complex, reactive systems
- Specifically addresses description explosion problem
Sorry, there isn’t a simple, easy-to-get, reference
- “The” statecharts paper, but long and a bit hard to find. D. Harel, "Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems, " Science of Computer Programming (1987).
- A general paper on statechart-like formalisms: D. Harel. "On Visual Formalisms," Comm. of the ACM (1988).
The i-Logix web site (http://www.ilogix.com/fs_papers.htm) has a set of papers, (you have to register your name, but it looks like it doesn’t check anything)
- The following looks reasonable at a glance: B.P. Douglass. State Machines and Statecharts: A White Paper. Embedded Systems Conference West (1999).