FSMC+, a tool for the generation of Java code from statecharts

Abstract

ProVotE is a two-phase project aiming at actuating art. 84 of law 2 -- 5/3/2003 of the Autonomous Province of Trento (Italy), which promotes the introduction of e-voting systems for the next provincial elections in Trentino (Nov. 2008). During the first phase of the ProVotE project we built jprovote, a Java/Linux e-voting system. The jprovote system has been used with experimental value by more than 11000 voters during local elections held in various municipalities of Trentino (Italy). A critical component of jprovote is its core logic, that is responsible of controlling the overall behavior of the e-voting machine during an election. In order to simplify its development and to allow for formal verification of this critical component we developed FSMC+. FSMC+ is a compiler that takes as input a subset of UML Statecharts and produces the corresponding Java and NuSMV code (NuSMV is a model checker developed at ITC-irst). Support for parameters in events, complex expressions in guards, and support to nested states are some of the distinguishing features of FSMC+. In this paper we present FSMC+ and we show how we used it for the development and the verification of the ProVotE e-voting machine. Even though FSMC+ has been specifically created to ease the development of jprovote, we believe the approach and the tool we developed to be general enough to be used in other applications.