ADVcharts: a Visual Formalism for Highly Interactive Systems

This paper introduces a new visual formalism, called ADVcharts, for specifying the behavior of interactive systems (including multi-modal interactive systems) using a state-machine-based approach. ADVcharts combine concepts from Abstract Data Views (ADVs), with notations from Objectcharts, Statecharts, and Petri-nets. ADVcharts are part of the ADV specification approach. In this paper, we abbreviate the “ADV specification approach” term to ADVspec. The ADVspec allows the designer to express visually both the relationship among the user-interface objects and the flow of control of an interactive system using a single integrated approach. It is intended that the ADVspec will serve as a foundation for a future design methodology for interactive systems. In particular, we show some aspects of design specific to interactive systems, such as the association of input and output events with particular Abstract Data Views, the concurrency of the components of a user interface, and the representation of various modes (input and output) in the design of an interactive system. The semantics of ADVcharts are presented through the specification of some examples, and we demonstrate that ADVcharts can be used as a visual specification language to represent highly interactive systems from the perspective of the user interface. We conclude this paper by demonstrating that VDM-like specifications can be derived directly from ADVcharts, thus providing the ADV concept with complementary visual and textual formalisms.