Markus Herrmannsdörfer, Sascha Konrad, Brian Berenbach. Tabular notations for state machine-based specifications. Cross Talk, The Journal of defense Software Engineering, , March 2008.
Finite state machines are a widely used concept for specifying the behavior of reactive systems. Numerous graphical notations based on finite state machines have been developed and are commonly used today, such as state transition diagrams, Harel statecharts, and Unified Modeling Language (UML) state machine diagrams. While not as widely used, tabular notations for state machine-based specifications offer complementary advantages to diagrammatic notations. In this article, we describe five approaches using tabular notations for state machine-based specifications and evaluate these approaches for use in software development.