H-COSTAM: a hierarchical communicating state-machine model for generic prototyping

This paper presents a methodology that aims at the specification, verification and prototyping of large distributed systems. This methodology relies on H-COSTAM: a high level representation that supports hierarchy and focuses on message passing communication mechanisms. In order to enable validation based on a formal representation, a translation procedure to Petri net is proposed. We also show this can fit discrete application domains. Translation from discrete high level formalism into H-COSTAM is possible. We present an example with Estelle