Generalised Regular MSC Languages

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.