From requirements to specifications

Live sequence charts (LSCs) provide a formal visual framework for creating scenario-based requirements for reactive systems. An LSC imposes a partial order over a set of events, such as the sending or receiving of messages. Each event is associated with a liveness property, indicating whether it can or must occur. Time extensions can further specify when these events should occur. An individual LSC tells a story about particular fragment of system behavior, whereas LSC specifications - a finite set of LSCs - collectively define the total behavior. An LSC specification may require that more than one distinct scenario, or multiple instances of the same scenario, execute concurrently. It is natural to ask whether LSC specifications can be synthesized into formal languages. Previous work offers translations from untimed LSCs to finite state machines, and from single (non-concurrent) LSCs to timed automata. Here, we show that LSC specifications with concurrency can also be expressed as a timed automata.