State diagram matrix for hierarchical specification of reactive system

Reactive systems respond to internal or external stimuli and act in an event-driven manner. It is generally difficult to specify a complex reactive systems' behavior using conventional state machine formalism. One reason is that actual reactive systems are usually formed by combining plural state-machines that behave concurrently. This paper presents the State Diagram Matrix (SDM) which is a visual and hierarchical formalism of such a reactive system's behavior. SDM has two concepts. The first is matrix plane description on which 3-dimensional state space is projected. The second is state abstraction for hierarchical state-machine definition. Understandability and reliability of control software was improved as a consequence of adopting SDM for specifying disk-subsystem control requirements. The development support functions of SDM using a workstation are also described.