Conceptualization in State Machines, Statecharts, and Flow Model

Conceptual modeling provides a foundation for the development phases of software systems. UML has become one of the major conceptual modeling tools in Object-Oriented software engineering utilized in a wide range of applications and domains. However, concerns have arisen recently regarding UML tools used in this area. In this paper, we scrutinize the concept of State utilized extensively in UML statecharts. We show that statecharts do not generally provide a clear definition of States when applied in the conceptual modeling of software systems. We also introduce a flow model as a viable alternative to statecharts in this type of application.