Architecture of a Requirements and Design Tool Based on Message Sequence Charts

Abstract

Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) are increasingly supported in software engineering tools to capture system requirements, test scenarios, and simulation traces of reactive systems. The latest standard syntax of MSCs [12] offers operations to compose MSCs in a hierarchical, iterating, and nondeterministic way. The various operators are a step towards increasing the applicability of MSCs to more than a trace language. However, current tools operate on MSCs that describe finite, deterministic behavior and none of them uses MSCs as a language for requirements specification and design of a system. In this paper, we propose an architecture for an MSC-based tool to support the requirements specification and design phases. The main functionalities of the tool are: an environment for the composition of system models through MSCs, syntactic and model-based analysis of an MSC model, and resolving resource related underspecifications in an MSC model. The proposed tool also supports synthesis mechanisms as a means to integrate our tool with available tools, e.g., the SPIN model-checker. In this paper, we also review the theoretical results we have currcntly developed towards realizing thc proposed tool.