Chapter 11: Representing System Behavior with State Diagrams

A state diagram is a type of diagram that you can use to model and document state machines. A state machine is an abstract way of representing a system or an algorithm. With a state machine, you can describe the various states that a system can be in and the different ways in which the system can move between those states. A state machine needs to be modeled in such a way that there is a finite number of states.

In the literature, there is a wealth of different types of state machines both in software engineering and computer science, where they are used to provide a mathematical model of computation. In software engineering, they are used to model systems and have, for instance, been included in the Unified Modeling Language. Mermaid's approach is not strict adherence to any specific type of state machine, but to provide the tools required to create state machines and let the author of the diagram worry about what...