Article

Symbolic message sequence charts

Authors:

Abhik Roychoudhury,

Bikram SenguptaAuthors Info & Claims

ESEC-FSE '07: Proceedings of the the 6th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering

Pages 275 - 284

https://doi.org/10.1145/1287624.1287663

Published: 07 September 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) are a widely used visual formalism for scenario-based specifications of distributed reactive systems. In its conventional usage, an MSC captures an interaction snippet between concrete objects in the system. This leads to voluminous specifications when the system contains several objectsthat are behaviorally similar. In this paper, we propose a lightweight syntactic and semantic extension of MSCs, called Symbolic MSCs or SMSCs, where an MSC lifeline can denote some/all objects from a collection. Our extensions give us substantially more modeling power. Moreover, we present a symbolic execution semantics for (structured collections of) our extended MSCs. This allows us to validate MSC-based system models capturing interactions between large, or even unbounded, number of objects. Since our extensions are only concerned with MSC lifelines, we believe that they can be integrated into existing standards such as UML 2.0.

References

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ITU-TS Recommendation Z.120, 1996. Message Sequence Charts (MSC).

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M. A. Reniers. Message Sequence Chart: Syntax and Semantics. PhD thesis, Technical University Eindhoven, 1999.

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H. Storrle. Semantics of interactions in UML 2.0. In Visual Languages and Formal Methods (VLFM), 2003.

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Center-TRACON Automation System (CTAS) for air traffic control. http://ctas.arc.nasa.gov/.

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I. Kruger, W. Prenninger, and R. Sander. Broadcast MSCs. Formal Aspects of Computing, 16(3), 2004.

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CTAS requirements document. http://scesm04.upb.de/case-study-2/requirements.pdf/.

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B. Genest, M. Minea, A. Muscholl, and D. Peled. Specifying and verifying partial order properties using template MSCs. In FOSSACS, 2004.

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B. Sengupta and R. Cleaveland. Triggered message sequence charts. In FSE, 2002.

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W. Damm and D. Harel. LSCs: Breathing life into message sequence charts. Formal Methods in System Design, 2001.

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Cited By

Maoz S(2018)Polymorphic scenario-based specification modelsSoftware and Systems Modeling (SoSyM)10.1007/s10270-010-0168-611:3(327-345)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10270-010-0168-6
Kumar SKhoo SRoychoudhury ALo DGlinz MMurphy GPezzè M(2012)Inferring class level specifications for distributed systemsProceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering10.5555/2337223.2337331(914-924)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2337223.2337331
Roychoudhury AGoel ASengupta B(2012)Symbolic Message Sequence ChartsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)10.1145/2089116.208912221:2(1-44)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2089116.2089122
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Symbolic message sequence charts
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Requirements analysis

Recommendations

Triggered message sequence charts

We propose an extension to Message Sequence Charts called Triggered Message Sequence Charts (TMSCs) that are intended to capture system specifications involving nondeterminism in the form of conditional scenarios. The visual syntax of TMSCs closely ...
Symbolic Message Sequence Charts

Message sequence charts (MSCs) are a widely used visual formalism for scenario-based specifications of distributed reactive systems. In its conventional usage, an MSC captures an interaction snippet between concrete objects in the system. This leads to ...
Triggered Message Sequence Charts

This paper introduces Triggered Message Sequence Charts (TMSCs), a graphical, mathematically well-founded framework for capturing scenario-based system requirements of distributed systems. Like Message Sequence Charts (MSCs), TMSCs are graphical ...

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cover image ACM Conferences

ESEC-FSE '07: Proceedings of the the 6th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering

September 2007

638 pages

ISBN:9781595938114

DOI:10.1145/1287624

General Chair:
Ivica Crnkovic
Mälardalen University, Sweden
,
Program Chair:
Antonia Bertolino
ISTI-CNR, Italy

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 07 September 2007

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ESEC/FSE07

Sponsor:

ESEC/FSE07: Joint 11th European Software Engineering Conference 2007

September 3 - 7, 2007

Dubrovnik, Croatia

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Overall Acceptance Rate 112 of 543 submissions, 21%

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Citations

Cited By

Maoz S(2018)Polymorphic scenario-based specification modelsSoftware and Systems Modeling (SoSyM)10.1007/s10270-010-0168-611:3(327-345)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10270-010-0168-6
Kumar SKhoo SRoychoudhury ALo DGlinz MMurphy GPezzè M(2012)Inferring class level specifications for distributed systemsProceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering10.5555/2337223.2337331(914-924)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2337223.2337331
Roychoudhury AGoel ASengupta B(2012)Symbolic Message Sequence ChartsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)10.1145/2089116.208912221:2(1-44)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2089116.2089122
Kumar SKhoo SRoychoudhury ALo D(2012)Inferring class level specifications for distributed systems2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227128(914-924)Online publication date: Jun-2012
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227128
Bannour BGaston CLapitre AEscobedo J(2012)Incremental Symbolic Conformance Testing from UML MARTE Sequence DiagramsProceedings of the 2012 IEEE 14th International Symposium on High-Assurance Systems Engineering10.1109/HASE.2012.18(9-16)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/HASE.2012.18
Kumar STaylor RGall HMedvidović N(2011)Specification mining in concurrent and distributed systemsProceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/1985793.1986029(1161-1163)Online publication date: 21-May-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1985793.1986029
Kumar STaylor RGall HMedvidović N(2011)Specification mining in concurrent and distributed systemsProceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/1985793.1986002(1086-1089)Online publication date: 21-May-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1985793.1986002
Kumar SKhoo SRoychoudhury ALo DTaylor RGall HMedvidović N(2011)Mining message sequence graphsProceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/1985793.1985807(91-100)Online publication date: 21-May-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1985793.1985807
Gaston CAiguier MBahrami DLapitre A(2009)Symbolic Execution Techniques Extended to SystemsProceedings of the 2009 Fourth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances10.1109/ICSEA.2009.21(78-85)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSEA.2009.21
Maoz S(2009)Polymorphic Scenario-Based Specification ModelsProceedings of the 12th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-642-04425-0_38(499-513)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-04425-0_38

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