Live sequence charts
Live sequence charts (LSC) constitute a visual formalism for inter-object scenario-based specification and programming, which extends the partial-order semantics of classical message sequence charts (MSC) mainly by adding universal and existential modalities. It thus allows the definition of inter-object scenarios that specify, among other things,possible, mandatory, and forbidden behavior. LSC was introduced by Werner Damm and David Harel in 2001.
An executable semantics for LSCs, termed play-out, was presented by David Harel and Rami Marelly in 2003, together with a tool called Play-Engine. A translation of LSC into various temporal logics was defined by Hillel Kugler et al. in 2005. A UML2-compliant variant of LSC was defined by David Harel and Shahar Maoz in 2006. The language has been the subject of research in the areas of verification and testing , in the areas of scenario-based execution (playout) and synthesis, and in the areas of specification mining and software visualization. Initial projects that use LSC have been carried out recently in the automotive, telecommunication, and hardware domains.
More about LSC can be found in the references below and in David Harel's website.
Selected references on LSC
Language definitions
- Werner Damm and David Harel, LSCs: Breathing Life into Message Sequence Charts, Formal Methods in System Design, 19(1): 45-80 (2001).
- David Harel and Shahar Maoz, Assert and Negate Revisited: Modal Semantics for UML Sequence Diagrams, Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM), 7(2): 237-252 (2008).
Scenario-based execution (play-out) and synthesis
- Shahar Maoz, David Harel, and Asaf Kleinbort, A Compiler for Multi-Modal Scenarios: Transforming LSCs into AspectJ, ACM Trans. on Soft. Eng. and Method. (TOSEM). Accepted November 2009. To appear.
- Shahar Maoz and David Harel, From Multi-Modal Scenarios to Code: Compiling LSCs into AspectJ, Proc. 14th ACM SIGSOFT Symp. on Foundations of Software Engineering (SIGSOFT FSE'06), ACM, 2006, pp. 219-230.
- David Harel, Hillel Kugler, Rami Marelly, Amir Pnueli, Smart Play-out of Behavioral Requirements, Proc. of Formal Methods in Computer Aided Design (FMCAD) 2002, pp. 378-398.
- David Harel and Rami Marelly, Specifying and executing behavioral requirements: the play-in/play-out approach, Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM), 2(2): 82-107 (2003)
