Abstract
Message sequence charts (MSCs) are an appealing visual formalism often used to capture system requirements in the early stages of design. An important question concerning MSCs is the following: how does one convert requirements represented by MSCs into state-based specifications? A first step in this direction was the definition in [9] of regular collections of MSCs, together with a characterization of this class in terms of finite-state distributed devices called message-passing automata. These automata are, in general, nondeterministic. In this paper, we strengthen this connection and describe how to directly associate a deterministic message-passing automaton with each regular collection of MSCs. Since real life distributed protocols are deterministic, our result is a more comprehensive solution to the synthesis problem for MSCs. Our result can be viewed as an extension of Zielonka’s theorem for Mazurkiewicz trace languages [6,19] to the setting of finite-state message-passing systems.
This work has been supported in part by Project DRD/CSE/98-99/MS-4 between the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and Ericsson (India), Project 2102-1 of the Indo-French Centre for Promotion of Advanced Research and NSF grant CDA9805735.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Alur, R., Holzmann, G.J., and Peled, D.: An analyzer for message sequence charts. Software Concepts and Tools, 17(2) (1996) 70–77.
Alur, R., and Yannakakis, M.: Model checking of message sequence charts. Proc. CONCUR’99, LNCS 1664, Springer Verlag (1999) 114–129.
Ben-Abdallah, H., and Leue, S.: Syntactic detection of process divergence and nonlocal choice in message sequence charts. Proc. TACAS’97, LNCS 1217, Springer-Verlag (1997) 259–274.
Booch, G., Jacobson, I., and Rumbaugh, J.: Unified Modeling Language User Guide. Addison Wesley (1997).
Damm, W., and Harel, D.: LCS’s: Breathing life into message sequence charts. Proc. FMOODS’99, Kluwer Academic Publishers (1999) 293–312.
Diekert, V., and Rozenberg, G. (Eds.): The book of traces. World Scientific (1995).
Harel, D., and Gery, E.: Executable object modeling with statecharts. IEEE Computer, July 1997 (1997) 31–42.
Henriksen, J. G., Mukund, M., Narayan Kumar K., and Thiagarajan, P. S.: On message sequence graphs and finitely generated regular MSC languages, to appear in Proc. ICALP 2000, LNCS, Springer-Verlag (2000).
Henriksen, J. G., Mukund, M., Narayan Kumar K., and Thiagarajan, P. S.: Regular collections of message sequence charts, to appear in Proc. MFCS 2000, LNCS, Springer-Verlag (2000).
Ladkin, P. B., and Leue, S.: Interpreting message flow graphs. Formal Aspects of Computing 7(5) (1975) 473–509.
Levin, V., and Peled, D.: Verification of message sequence charts via template matching. Proc. TAPSOFT’97, LNCS 1214, Springer-Verlag (1997) 652–666.
Mauw, S., and Reniers, M. A.: High-level message sequence charts, Proc. SDL’ 97, Elsevier (1997) 291–306.
Mukund, M., Narayan Kumar, K., and Sohoni, M.: Keeping track of the latest gossip in message-passing systems. Proc. Structures in Concurrency Theory (STRICT), Workshops in Computing Series, Springer-Verlag (1995) 249–263.
Muscholl, A.: Matching Specifications for Message Sequence Charts. Proc. FOSSACS’99, LNCS 1578, Springer-Verlag (1999) 273–287.
Muscholl, A., Peled, D., and Su, Z.: Deciding properties for message sequence charts. Proc. FOSSACS’98, LNCS 1378, Springer-Verlag (1998) 226–242.
Rudolph, E., Graubmann, P., and Grabowski, J.: Tutorial on message sequence charts. In Computer Networks and ISDN Systems—SDL and MSC, Volume 28 (1996).
Thomas, W.: Automata on infinite objects. In van Leeuwen, J. (Ed.), Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, Volume B, North-Holland, Amsterdam (1990) 133–191.
Thomas, W.: Languages, Automata, and Logic. In Rozenberg, G., and Salomaa, A. (Eds.), Handbook of Formal Language Theory, Vol. III, Springer-Verlag, New York (1997) 389–455.
Zielonka, W.: Notes on finite asynchronous automata. R. A. I. R. O.—Inf. Théor. et Appl., 21 (1987) 99–135.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mukund, M., Kumar, K.N., Sohoni, M. (2000). Synthesizing Distributed Finite-State Systems from MSCs. In: Palamidessi, C. (eds) CONCUR 2000 — Concurrency Theory. CONCUR 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1877. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44618-4_37
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44618-4_37
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67897-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44618-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive