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Model Checking of Message Sequence Charts

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CONCUR’99 Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 1999)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1664))

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Abstract

Scenario-based specifications such as message sequence charts (MSC) offer an intuitive and visual way of describing design requirements. Such specifications focus on message exchanges among communicating entities in distributed software systems. Structured specifications such as MSC-graphs and Hierarchical MSC-graphs (HMSC) allow convenient expression of multiple scenarios, and can be viewed as an early model of the system. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of the problem of verifying whether this model satisfies a temporal requirement given by an automaton, by developing algorithms for the different cases along with matching lower bounds.

When the model is given as an MSC, model checking can be done by constructing a suitable automaton for the linearizations of the partial order specified by the MSC, and the problem is coNP-complete. When the model is given by an MSC-graph, we consider two possible semantics depending on the synchronous or asynchronous interpretation of concatenating two MSCs. For synchronous model checking of MSC-graphs and HMSCs, we present algorithms whose time complexity is proportional to the product of the size of the description and the cost of processing MSCs at individual vertices. Under the asynchronous interpretation, we prove undecidability of the model checking problem. We, then, identify a natural requirement of boundedness, give algorithms to check boundedness, and establish asynchronous model checking to be Pspace-complete for bounded MSC-graphs and Expspace-complete for bounded HMSCs.

Supported in part by NSF CAREER award CCR-9734115 and by the DARPA grant NAG2-1214.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania

    Rajeev Alur

  2. Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, USA

    Rajeev Alur & Mihalis Yannakakis

Authors
  1. Rajeev Alur
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  2. Mihalis Yannakakis
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Jos C. M. Baeten  & Sjouke Mauw  & 

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Alur, R., Yannakakis, M. (1999). Model Checking of Message Sequence Charts. In: Baeten, J.C.M., Mauw, S. (eds) CONCUR’99 Concurrency Theory. CONCUR 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1664. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48320-9_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48320-9_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-66425-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48320-5

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