The Action Language: Refining a Behavioral Modeling Language

When modeling large-scale complex system behavior we believe there is merit in abandoning the once fashionable all-encompassing system modeling approach in favor of developing a set of models created in a variety of loosely coupled modeling languages. Loosely coupled languages are those that are considered to be nearly orthogonal with respect to their intention, but in reality may display a limited degree of trivial dependencies. We apply this approach toward component behavioral modeling to show how core behaviors of software components can be specified using a Statecharts-like behavioral modeling language while elements of the behavior associated with implementation- or platform-specific concepts are modeled using a wholly separate language.