In this thesis we tackle the difficulty of translating a high level formalism to Decision Diagrams (DDs). We propose to improve an existing DD (the ΣDD) and its operations to better handle new operations. Our solution adds an abstraction layer on top of ΣDDs. This abstraction layer can express the usual operations of DDs in a high level way. It allows the definition of the semantics of a system, the description of the model checking algorithm, and DD optimizations. Our layer is called Set Rewriting (SR). SR is an extension of classical Term Rewriting (TR). In SR we describe a system using terms and term rewriting rules as in TR. However, the rewrite rules of SR are designed to work on sets of terms instead of single terms. SR also uses TR strategies. TR strategies are operations to control the rewriting process. They enable a better control of rewrite process.