SCHAEM: A Method to Extract Statechart Representation of FSMs

UML statechart based models are being used extensively during software development to describe state behavior of components and systems. However, often designers produce state models that are essentially finite state machines rather than statecharts, lacking hierarchy and concurrency. Also for legacy code, reverse engineering efforts lead naturally to finite state machines rather than statecharts, necessitating a model transformation at a later stage. We propose a method to automatically convert an FSM model to an equivalent statechart model. Our experimental studies indicate that the statechart model results in significantly reduced structural complexity on the average compared to the original FSM models.