I've been using boost's asynchronous statechart to write a program. In this program I communicate with another device using an asynchronous serial port. I have a state that waits for a confirmation from the device over the serial port and then posts a "confirmation received" event. This works well but, I would also like to implement a "timeout" event. In previous programs I had been using switch case statements for my state machines where I had code that could be run each time the loop was run. This meant I could run code and check if I should change state due to something timing out. Like this: while(1){ switch (state){ case 0:{ sendMessage(); state = 1; sendTime = boost::chrono::steady_clock::now(); } break; case 1:{ if (isConfirmationReceived()){ // do something state = 2; } else if (boost::chrono::steady_clock::now() > start + boost::chrono::duration<double>(WAIT_LENGTH)){ //do something state = 3; } } break; // etc etc } } How would I implement something like this using boost::StateChart? Or, should i be thinking about this a completely different way?