Abstract

Message Sequence Charts (MSC) is a trace language. It is widely used to show sequences of messages interchanged between system components and their environment. It is gaining popularity in software engineering methods for concurrent and real-time systems. MSC has been standardized by the ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union, Telecommunication Standardization Sector of ITU) in Recommendation Z. 120 since 1992. A new revised standard Z.120 (MSC96) was approved by ITU-T in 1996. MSC includes two syntactical forms, MSC/PR as a pure textual and MSC/GR as a graphical representation. An MSC in MSC/GR representation can be transformed automatically into a corresponding MSC/PR representation. However, the reverse way is difficult since MSC/PR does not include graphical information such as height, width of symbols and texts. This report presents a software tool to convert a textual description into an internal representation, then to display the graphical representation. The object structure built in this software can be used in the further studying or analyzing of MSC96.

Document Downloads