Article

Detecting implied scenarios in message sequence chart specifications

Authors:

Sebastian Uchitel,

Jeff MageeAuthors Info & Claims

ESEC/FSE-9: Proceedings of the 8th European software engineering conference held jointly with 9th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering

Pages 74 - 82

https://doi.org/10.1145/503209.503220

Published: 01 September 2001 Publication History

Abstract

Scenario-based specifications such as Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) are becoming increasingly popular as part of a requirements specification. Scenario describe how system components, the environment and users work concurrently and interact in order to provide system level functionality. Each scenario is a partial story which, when combined with other scenarios, should conform to provide a complete system description. However, although it is possible to build a set of components such that each component behaves in accordance with the set of scenarios, their composition may not provide the required system behaviour. Implied scenarios may appear as a result of unexpected component interaction. In this paper, we present an algorithm that builds a labelled transition system (LTS) behaviour model that describes the closest possible implementation for a specification based on basic and high-level MSCs. We also present a technique for detecting and providing feedback on the existence of implied scenarios. We have integrated these procedures into the Labelled Transition System Analyser (LTSA), which allows for model checking and animation of the behaviour model.

References

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Alur, R., Etessami, K. and Yannakakis, M., Inference of Message Sequence Charts. 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'00). Limerick, Ireland, 2000.

Digital Library

[2]

Broy, M., Kruger, I., Grosu, R. and Scholz, P., From MSCs to Statecharts. Distributed and Parallel Embedded Systems, 1999, Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Digital Library

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Cobens, J.M.H., Engels, A., Mauw, S. and Reniers, M.A. Formal Semantics of Message Sequence Charts, Eindenhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 1998.

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Harel, D. and Damm, W., LSCs: Breathing Life into Message Sequence Charts. 3rd IFIP Int. Cond. of Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems, New York, 1999, Kluwer Academic.

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Helouet, L. and LeMaigat, P., Decomposition of Message Sequence Charts. 2nd Workshop on SDL and MSC, Grenoble, France, 2000.

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Holzmann, G.J. and Peled, D. The state of Spin, CAV'96, LNCS 1102, 1996.

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ITU-T Recommendation Z.120. Message Sequence Charts (MSC'96), ITU Telecommunication Standardisation Sector, Geneva, 1996.

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Magee, J. and Kramer, J. Concurrency: State Models and Java Programs. John Wiley & Sons Ltd., New York, 1999.

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Magee, J., Kramer, J., Giannakopoulou, D. and Pryce, N., Graphical Animation of Behavior Models. 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'00), Limerick, Ireland, 2000.

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Systa, T. Static and Dynamic Reverse Engineering Techniques for Java Software Systems Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Tampere, Tampere, 2000.

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Uchitel, S. LTSA-MSC Tool., Available at http://wwwdse. doc.ic.ac.uk/~su2/Synthesis/ Department of Computing, Imperial College, 2001.

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Uchitel, S. and Kramer, J., A Workbench for Synthesising Behaviour Models from Scenarios. 23rd International Conferecne on Software Engineering (ICSE'01), Toronto, Canada, 2001.

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Uchitel, S., Magee, J. and Kramer, J. Detecting Implied Scenarios in MSCs Using LTSA, Department of Computing, Imperial College, 2001.

[14]

Van Lamsweerde, A. and Willemet, L. Inferring Declarative Requirements Specifications from Operational Scenarios. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 24 (12). 1089-1114.

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Whittle, J. and Schumann, J., Generating Statechart Designs from Scenarios. in 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'00), Limerick, Ireland, 2000.

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Cited By

Ye WShizhe SBo JJunwu C(2022)Modeling Characteristics in the Design of E-Collaboration SystemsInternational Journal of e-Collaboration10.4018/IJeC.29900418:1(1-17)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/IJeC.299004
Hu MDuan WZhang MWei TChen M(2020)Quantitative Timing Analysis for Cyber-Physical Systems Using Uncertainty-Aware Scenario-Based SpecificationsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2020.301284339:11(4006-4017)Online publication date: Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2020.3012843
Daun MBrings JWeyer TBures TFitzgerald JSchmerl BWeyns D(2018)A semi-automated approach to foster the validation of collaborative networks of cyber-physical systemsProceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Software Engineering for Smart Cyber-Physical Systems10.1145/3196478.3196483(6-12)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3196478.3196483
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Index Terms

Detecting implied scenarios in message sequence chart specifications
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Modeling and simulation
    1. Model development and analysis
      1. Model verification and validation
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Requirements analysis
    2. Software development techniques
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. System description languages
      1. Specification languages

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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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Reviews

Reviewer: Marian Gheorghe

Scenarios describe how systems components, the environment, and various users work concurrently. Each scenario is a story, providing a partial system description, and all scenarios are combined in order to give a complete system description. Scenarios can combine unexpectedly, and some system behaviors, not present in the scenario specification, may appear in the implementation (these are called implied scenarios). Message sequence charts (MSCs) represent a very popular scenario-based language. This paper presents an algorithm that synthesizes a labeled transition system (LTS) behavior model, which describes the implementation for a scenario-based specification such as basic MSCs and high-level MSCs, and detects the existence of implied scenarios. The investigation presented defines the closest possible implementation for a specification based on basic MSCs and high-level MSCs by extending Alur et al’s approach [1], which has been limited to a set of MSCs that specify a finite set of finite system behaviors. The framework presented integrates with existing labeled transition system analysis, and consequently the synthesized implementation can be analyzed further using model checking safety and liveness properties. It can also be animated using available tools [2]. Online Computing Reviews Service

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ESEC/FSE-9: Proceedings of the 8th European software engineering conference held jointly with 9th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering

September 2001

329 pages

ISBN:1581133901

DOI:10.1145/503209

Conference Chairs:
A. Min Tjoa
Vienna Univ. of Technology, Vienna, Austria
,
Volker Gruhn
Univ. of Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes Volume 26, Issue 5
Sept. 2001
329 pages
ISSN:0163-5948
DOI:10.1145/503271
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2001 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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CEPIS: Council of European Professional Informatics Societies
VIENUT: Vienna University of Technology
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 01 September 2001

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ESEC/FSE01

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CEPIS
VIENUT
SIGSOFT

ESEC/FSE01: European Software Engineering Conference 2001/ Foundations on Software Engineering 2001

September 10 - 14, 2001

Vienna, Austria

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ESEC/FSE-9 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 137 submissions, 21%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 112 of 543 submissions, 21%

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Cited By

Ye WShizhe SBo JJunwu C(2022)Modeling Characteristics in the Design of E-Collaboration SystemsInternational Journal of e-Collaboration10.4018/IJeC.29900418:1(1-17)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/IJeC.299004
Hu MDuan WZhang MWei TChen M(2020)Quantitative Timing Analysis for Cyber-Physical Systems Using Uncertainty-Aware Scenario-Based SpecificationsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2020.301284339:11(4006-4017)Online publication date: Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2020.3012843
Daun MBrings JWeyer TBures TFitzgerald JSchmerl BWeyns D(2018)A semi-automated approach to foster the validation of collaborative networks of cyber-physical systemsProceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Software Engineering for Smart Cyber-Physical Systems10.1145/3196478.3196483(6-12)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3196478.3196483
Tenbergen BDaun MAluko Obe PBrings j(2018)View-Centric Context Modeling to Foster the Engineering of Cyber-Physical System Networks2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)10.1109/ICSA.2018.00030(206-20609)Online publication date: Apr-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSA.2018.00030
Brings J(2017)Verifying Cyber-Physical System Behavior in the Context of Cyber-Physical System-Networks2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)10.1109/RE.2017.45(556-561)Online publication date: Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2017.45
Daun MBrings JBandyszak TBohn PWeyer TBures TWeyns DKlein MHaber R(2015)Collaborating multiple system instances of smart cyber-physical systemsProceedings of the First International Workshop on Software Engineering for Smart Cyber-Physical Systems10.5555/2821404.2821416(48-51)Online publication date: 16-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2821404.2821416
Abdallah RHélouët LJard C(2015)Distributed implementation of message sequence chartsSoftware and Systems Modeling (SoSyM)10.1007/s10270-013-0357-114:2(1029-1048)Online publication date: 1-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10270-013-0357-1
Hendijani Fard FFar B(2015)On the Usage of Network Visualization for Multiagent System VerificationOnline Social Media Analysis and Visualization10.1007/978-3-319-13590-8_10(201-228)Online publication date: 15-Jan-2015
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13590-8_10
Fard FFar B(2013)Detecting distributed software components that will not cause emergent behavior in asynchronous communication style2013 IEEE 14th International Conference on Information Reuse & Integration (IRI)10.1109/IRI.2013.6642473(201-208)Online publication date: Aug-2013
https://doi.org/10.1109/IRI.2013.6642473
Bowles JMeedeniya D(2012)Strongly consistent transformation of partial scenariosACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes10.1145/2237796.223780937:4(1-8)Online publication date: 16-Jul-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2237796.2237809
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