Statecharts composition to model topologically distributed applications

Many real-world systems can be conveniently modelled by the replication and interconnection of simple components of a few types: different configurations of the same system may vary just for the number of components and for the topology of their interconnections. In industrial practice of formal modelling the tedious work of such a manual instantiation has to be automated, allowing the inexpensive production of new configurations for the same product. This paper presents a methodology to build statechart models of topologically distributed systems by instantiating generic components; the method is able to replicate as needed statechart components and to expand the terms that drive their behaviour to create complex interconnection patterns along the required topology. The methodology is illustrated on the example of a classical distributed algorithm (Byzantine Agreement) in order to show the potential of dealing with parameterized distributed structures. The proposed methodology is shown to be able to find several interesting industrial applications.