Abstract

In this paper, we establish the concept of regularity for languages consisting of Message Sequence Charts (MSCs). To this aim, we formalise their behaviour by string languages and give a natural definition of regularity in terms of an appropriate Nerode right congruence. Moreover, we present a class of accepting automata and, using this characterisation, establish several decidability and closure properties of MSC languages. We also provide a logical characterisation by a monadic second-order logic interpreted over MSCs. In contrast to existing work on regular MSC languages, our approach is neither restricted to a certain class of MSCs nor tailored to a fixed communication medium (such as a FIFO channel). It explicitly allows MSCs with message overtaking and is thus applicable to a broad range of channel types like mixtures of stacks and FIFOs.

Citations