A Process Language for Statecharts

We define a compositional labelled transition system semantics for statecharts via a translation into a new process language called SP. The main novelty of the language is an operator of process refinement, which reflects the statecharts hierarchical structure. The translation agrees with Pnueli and Shalev semantics of statecharts. However, since the language is parametric in the set of basic actions and in some operations over actions, other semantics of statecharts can be obtained by suitably instantiating the actions corresponding to transitions and the operations over actions