The implementation of IEC60870-5-104 based on UML statechart and Qt state machine framework

Design based on finite-state machine (FSM) is a good solution to for event driven systems[3], but for large complex systems, the state diagrams of FSM are hard to read, difficult to draw and change, non-user-friendly, not good for stepwise refinement, cannot be decomposed into executable code[7], because traditional FSM is flat, having no hierarchy and lack of support for concurrent states [6], statecharts[8] overcome this limitation of traditional FSM. This paper gives the analysis of IEC-60870-5-104 communication protocol using UML statecharts, and gives implementation based on Qt State Machine Framework. The result shows our implementation meets the main function of the protocol. Design using UML statecharts make the statechart of IEC104 is very clear and easy to read. The research is also helpful to implement other communication protocol even other event driven systems.