Statechart Interpretation on Resource Constrained Platforms: a Performance Analysis

The statechart formalism allows for the specification of behaviour models of complex, reactive systems. It is employed in the embedded systems domain to specify and verify applications at design time. By enabling the interpretation of formalised behaviour models one earns the favourable abilities of application behaviour inspection, control, and substitution at runtime. One of the major arguments against such an approach concerns poor interpretation performance and high-resource overhead. We are answering this argument by showing that it is feasible to implement a statechart interpreter on a resource-limited platform. We define the utilised statechart formalism and use it as a base for implementing a resource-efficient interpreter on a 8bit microcontroller with 2 kByte RAM. Performance overhead of key aspects of the interpretation engine is evaluated using suitable behaviour models and by comparison with compiled code.