Home // International Journal On Advances in Systems and Measurements, volume 6, numbers 3 and 4, 2013 // View article

Towards Evolvable State Machines and their Applications

Authors:
Dirk van der Linden
Wim Ploegaerts
Georg Neugschwandtner
Herwig Mannaert

Keywords: Normalized Systems ; Evolvability; Finite State Machines; Automation Systems; Information Technology.

Abstract:
Since several decades, the pressure on organizations to swiftly adapt to their environment has been increasing. At the same time, the complexity of products and services has been growing. One of the consequences is the increasing importance of the evolvability of software, whether this software supports production control systems in industry or business information systems. Over the past decades, finite state machines have become an increasingly popular tool for modelling behavioural aspects of software. This paper presents an explorative attempt to define design rules and constraints that should be applied to state machines to enable evolvability. Our design of an evolvable state machine is based on Normalized Systems Theory. This design is discussed in the context of automation systems as well as more general information processing applications.

Pages: 335 to 352

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2013. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2013

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-261x