LSCs: Breathing Life into Message Sequence Charts
Formal Methods in System Design
Syntactic Detection of Process Divergence and Non-local Choice inMessage Sequence Charts
TACAS '97 Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Tools and Algorithms for Construction and Analysis of Systems
Safe Realizability of High-Level Message Sequence Charts
CONCUR '02 Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Concurrency Theory
Deciding Properties for Message Sequence Charts
FoSSaCS '98 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structure
Inference of Message Sequence Charts
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Regular sets of infinite message sequence charts
Information and Computation
Triggered Message Sequence Charts
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Quantifying the discord: order discrepancies in message sequence charts
ATVA'07 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Automated technology for verification and analysis
A framework for pathologies of message sequence charts
Information and Software Technology
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The analysis of message sequence charts (MSCs) is highly important in preventing common problems in communication protocols. Detecting race conditions, i.e., possible discrepancies in event order, was studied for a single MSC and for MSC graphs (a graph where each node consists of a single MSC, also called HMSC). For the former case, this problem can be solved in quadratic time, while for the latter case it was shown to be undecidable. However, the prevailing real-life situation is that a collection of MSCs, called here an ensemble, describing the different possible scenarios of the system behavior, is provided, rather than a single MSC or an MSC graph. For an ensemble of MSCs, a potential race condition in one of its MSCs can be compensated by another MSC in which the events occur in a different order. We provide a polynomial algorithm for detecting races in an ensemble. On the other hand, we show that in order to prevent races, the size of an ensemble may have to grow exponentially with the number of messages. Also, we initiate the formal study of the standard MSC coregion construct, which is used to relax the order among events of a process. We show that by using this construct, we can provide more compact race-free ensembles; however, detecting races becomes NP-complete.