A Universal Control Construct for Abstract State Machines

Abstract State Machines can be used to specify arbitrary system behaviour. However, when writing executable specifications one often has to write additional statements which organise how, e.g., in which order, the rules are executed. This reduces the readability and comprehensibility of specifications and can introduce additional defects to them. We propose a new syntax construct for the specification of control flow for the ASM language which improves the compactness and readability of specifications by providing syntactic elements for often manually realised behaviour. This construct enables to parametrise which rules shall be selected for execution and how the selected rules are executed. We illustrate how the control construct can improve the code’s readability on some examples. The proposed control construct is also released as a plugin for CoreASM.