Executable object modeling with statecharts

This paper reports on an effort to develop an integrated set of diagrammatic languages for modeling object-oriented systems, and to construct a supporting tool. The goal is for models to be intuitive and well-structured, yet fully executable and analyzable, enabling automatic synthesis of usable and efficient code in object-oriented languages such as C++. At the heart of the modeling method is the language of statecharts for specifying object behavior, and a hierarchical OMT-like language for describing the structure of classes and their inter-relationships, that we call O-charts. Objects can interact by event generation, or by direct invocation of operations. In the interest of keeping the exposition manageable, we leave out some technically involved topics, such as multiple-thread concurrency and active objects