Live sequence charts
Live sequence charts (LSC) constitute a visual formalism for inter-object scenario-based specification and programming, which extends the classical language of 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 Damm and Harel in 1999.
A method for constructing LSCs directly from a pre-prepared GUI, called play-in, as well as a method for executing a collection of LSCs, termed play-out, were devised by Harel and Marelly in 2003. They also built a tool, called the Play-Engine to support LSCs and these two methods. A translation of LSC into various temporal logics was defined by Kugler et al. in 2005. A UML2-compliant variant of LSC and a compilation technique from LSC into AspectJ were later defined by Harel and Maoz. The language has been the subject of research on verification, testing, and synthesis, in the areas of specification mining and software visualization, and more. 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 Harel's homepage.
Selected references on LSC
- D. Harel and R. Marelly, "Specifying and Executing Behavioral Requirements: The Play In/Play-Out Approach", Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM) 2 (2003), 82-107. PDF, 420Kb (the original publication is available at http://link.springer.de or at http://link.springerny.com)
- D. Harel and R. Marelly, Come, Let's Play: Scenario-Based Programming Using LSCs and the Play-Engine, Springer-Verlag, 2003.
- W. Damm and D. Harel, "LSCs: Breathing Life into Message Sequence Charts", Formal Methods in System Design 19:1 (2001), 45-80. PDF, 260Kb
- D. Harel and S. Maoz, "Assert and Negate Revisited: Modal Semantics for UML Sequence Diagrams", Software and System Modeling (SoSyM) 7:2 (2008), 237-252. (Early version in 5th Int. Workshop on Scenarios and State Machines: Models, Algorithms and Tools (SCESM'06), 2006, pp. 13-20.) PDF, 286Kb
- S. Maoz, D. Harel and A. Kleinbort, "A Compiler for Multi-Modal Scenarios: Transforming LSCs into AspectJ", ACM Trans. on Software Engineering Method. To appear 2010.
- S. Maoz and D. Harel, "From Multi-Modal Scenarios to Code: Compiling LSCs into AspectJ", Proc. 14th ACM SIGSOFT Symp. on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE'06), Portland, Nov. 2006, pp. 219-230. PDF, 212Kb
- D. Harel, H. Kugler, R. Marelly and A. Pnueli, "Smart Play-Out of Behavioral Requirements", Proc. 4th Int. Conf. on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design (FMCAD 2002), November 2002, pp. 378-398. PDF, 135Kb
