Introduction to Statecharts Modeling, Simulation, Testing, and Deployment

Statecharts, introduced by David Harel in 1987, is a formalism used to specify the behavior of timed, autonomous, and reactive systems using a discrete-event abstraction. It extends Timed Finite State Automata with depth, orthogonality, broadcast communication, and history. Its visual representation is based on higraphs, which combine hypergraphs and Euler diagrams. Many tools offer visual editing, simulation, and code synthesis support for Statecharts. Examples include STATEMATE, Rhapsody, Yakindu, and Stateflow, each implementing different variants of Harels original semantics. This tutorial introduces modeling, simulation, testing, and deployment of Statecharts. We start from the basic concepts of states and transitions and explain the more advanced concepts of Statecharts by extending a running example (a traffic light) incrementally. We use Yakindu to model the example system. This is an updated version of the paper with the same name that appeared at the Winter Simulation Conference in 2018 (Van Mierlo and Vangheluwe 2018).