Collaborative state machine

CollaborativeStateMachine

Within the Collaborative State Machines model, applications are modeled as networks of collaborating, distributable state machines that exhibit autonomous, reactive behavior. A state machine transitions between control states in response to events, executing actions during transitions, on state entry or exit, or while active within a state. These actions may invoke computational services, manipulate data, or emit events.

CSM extends the traditional single state machine paradigm by representing an application as a coordinated collection of one or more (distributed) state machines. These state machines collaborate through asynchronous event propagation and shared data semantics while preserving a unified application model.

Data and Memory Model

The CSM data model defines three primary data scopes:

• Persistent data: Shared application-wide state accessible across the collaborative state machine.
• Transient data: State-machine-local data scoped to a specific distributed execution context.
• Static data: Control-state-local data preserved across repeated activations of the same control state.

Data is declared lexically within the application specification rather than dynamically allocated at runtime. Variable values are resolved through expression evaluation. See Data Model for details.

The execution and deployment topology of a CSM is governed by its Memory Mode, which defines how state machines are distributed and how memory is shared:

• Shared Memory Mode
  All constituent state machines execute within a single computing resource and share the same memory space. A standalone StateMachine is restricted to this mode.

• Distributed Memory Mode
  State machines execute across multiple decoupled computing resources, each maintaining its own local memory space while coordinating through events and shared persistent state.

A CollaborativeStateMachine defines the root scope of a distributed state machine application.

new CollaborativeStateMachine {
  stateMachines {
    ["name"] = new StateMachine { ... }
    ...
  }
  persistent = new Context { ... }
}

Properties

Property	Type	Multiplicity	Description
stateMachines	Map<String, StateMachine>	Required	A non-empty map of uniquely named StateMachine definitions composing the collaborative state machine.
persistent	Context	Optional	Declares the persistent data scope shared across the collaborative state machine.

stateMachines

Defines the collection of collaborating state machines that compose the collaborative state machine.

Constraint: Minimum Cardinality

The stateMachines map must contain at least one valid StateMachine definition.

Each key within the map must be unique and identify a single constituent state machine.

persistent

Defines the lexically scoped persistent data shared across the collaborative state machine. Variables declared within this scope are accessible according to the CSM scoping rules and may be synchronized across distributed memory domains depending on the selected memory mode.