Race Conditions in Message Sequence Charts

Abstract

Abstract. Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) are a graphical language for the description of scenarios in terms of message exchanges between communicating components in a distributed environment. The language has been standardised by the ITU and given a formal semantics by means of a process algebra. In this paper, we review a design anomaly, called race condition, in an MSC specification and argue that the current solution correcting race conditions is too weak when implementation is considered. In this paper, we provide an algorithm on partial orders as our solution. The result is a strengthened partial order, which is race-free and remains race-free in the implementation.

Model inspections in the engineering of collaborative cyber‐physical systems with instance‐level review diagrams

“…potentially unsafe behavior emerging from collaboration. Two approaches are of particular importance and also build the foundations for Section 3: first, approaches dealing with implied scenarios; that is, behavior that is not explicitly specified within an MSC document but emerges from the combination of different diagrams (e.g., other works [44][45][46] ) or from the causal ordering of MSC (e.g., Chen et al and Mitchell 47,48 ) and second, approaches dealing with emergent behavior; that is, the behavior resulting from the interplay of multiple systems in a collaborative CPS network (e.g., Fard and Far and Moshirpour et al 41,49 ). Whereas the related approaches focus on the detection of emergent behavior, we aim at properly displaying emergent behavior in different configurations of the collaborative CPS network to aid the manual review of specifications in early development phases.…”

Controllable-choice Message Sequence Graphs

“…The errors can cause problems during implementation or even make it impossible. Concerning verification of MSC models, researchers have studied a presence of a race condition in an MSC [3,7,10,22], boundedness of the message channels [4], the possibility to reach a non-local branching node [6,19,13,16,17,11,20], deadlocks, livelocks, and many more. For a recent overview of current results see, e.g.…”