Abstract
Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) are an attractive visual formalism widely used to capture system requirements during the early design stages in domains such as telecommunication software. A standard method to describe multiple communication scenarios is to use message sequence graphs (MSGs). A message sequence graph allows the protocol designer to write a finite specification which combines MSCs using basic operations such as branching choice, composition and iteration. The MSC languages described by MSGs are not necessarily regular in the sense of [HM+99]. We characterize here the class of regular MSC languages that are MSG-definable in terms of a notion called finitely generated MSC languages. We show that a regular MSC language is MSG-definable if and only if it is finitely generated. In fact we show that the subclass of “bounded” MSGs defined in [AY99] exactly capture the class of finitely generated regular MSC languages.
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Henriksen, J.G., Mukund, M., Kumar, K.N., Thiagarajan, P.S. (2000). On Message Sequence Graphs and Finitely Generated Regular MSC Languages. In: Montanari, U., Rolim, J.D.P., Welzl, E. (eds) Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1853. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45022-X_57
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45022-X_57
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