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.
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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
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44618-4_37
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