From Live Sequence Charts to Distributed Implementation

Mechanized generation of prototypes from high-level specifications has long been an ultimate challenge for software engineering. One high-level specification of great interest is scenario-based sequence diagrams. Sequence diagrams serve as the manifestation of use cases and if synthesizable they could lead directly to implementation. In this work, we propose a method to generate prototypes all the way from a variant of sequence diagrams, namely Live Sequence Charts (LSC). The idea is of using mature theories and tool support of Communicating Sequential Process (CSP) to offer practical solutions to the distributed synthesis and verification problem of LSC. Our approach starts with defining a formal semantics for LSC, based on which a sound CSP interpretation of LSC is developed. CSP algebraic laws are then applied to synthesize the distributed behaviors of each object without constructing the global state machine. Another implication is that tool support for CSP can be reused to verify LSC specifications.