CoSDL: An Experimental Language for Collaboration Specification

The decomposition of distributed systems is often driven by its process structure only, focusing on the behaviour of individual agents. In previous work, we have argued that this is not always an adequate modularization of distributed systems, and have proposed “cross-cutting” collaboration modules instead. In this paper, we discuss language support for the specification of collaboration modules that goes beyond the capabilities of SDL and MSC. In particular, we introduce the experimental formal description technique CoSDL, which was designed as a “proof of concept” for collaboration-based design with SDL. We believe that the lessons learned from CoSDL are valuable for collaboration-oriented extensions of MSC, SDL, and corresponding tool environments.