Deciding Properties of Message Sequence Charts

Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) is a notation used in practice by protocol designers and system engineers. It is defined within an international standard (ITU Z120), and is also included, in a slightly different form, in the popular UML standard (called there sequence diagrams). We present some of the main results related to this notation, in the context of specification and automatic verification of communication protocols. We look at issues related to specification and verification. In particular, we look at automatic verification (model checking) of MSCs. We study the expressiveness of MSCs, in particular the ability to express communication protocols, and appropriate formalisms for specifying properties of MSC systems.