A submachine state specifies the insertion of the specification of a submachine state machine. The state machine that contains the submachine state is called the containing state machine. The same state machine may be a submachine more than once in the context of a single containing state machine.
A submachine state is semantically equivalent to a composite state. The regions of the submachine state machine are the regions of the composite state. The entry, exit, and behavior actions and internal transitions are defined as part of the state. Submachine state is a decomposition mechanism that allows factoring of common behaviors and their reuse.