State Transition Diagrams

Abstract

In the two preceding chapters, we studied how to define the effect of events by means of effect() operations. An alternative, or complementary, way is the use of state transition diagrams. This is the main topic of this chapter. We start in Sect. 13.1 with a brief review of finite state machines and their associated state transition diagrams. We then explain, in Sect. 13.2, how entities can be modeled as state machines, and that in this case state transition diagrams are part of the behavioral schema. Sections 13.3 to 13.5 describe how state transition diagrams can be defined in UML.