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.