Plug-and-Play Composition of Features and Feature Interactions with Statechart
Diagrams 
Christian PREHOFER
DoCoMo Euro-Labs, Landsbergerstr. 312, 80687 Munich, Germany prehofer@docomolab-euro.com
Abstract. This paper presents a new approach for modular design of
highly-entangled software components by statechart diagrams. We structure
the components into features, which represent reusable, self-contained services.
These are modeled individually by statechart diagrams. For composition of
components from features, we need to consider the interactions between the
features. These feature interactions, which are well known in the telecommunications
area, typically describe special cases or cooperations which only occur when
features are combined. We describe these interactions graphically as well
by partial statecharts. The main novelty is that full component descriptions
are created automatically in a plug-and-play fashion by combining the statecharts
for the required features and their interactions. Furthermore, we develop
different classes of statecharts and show the interactions on a case-by-case
basis. For composition, we use semantic refinement concepts for statecharts
which preserve the original behavior.
Keywords: graphic description techniques, plug-and-play composition,
feature interaction, statechart diagrams, semantic refinement, UML