Automatic synthesis of SDL from MSC and its applications in forward and reverse engineering

Wider adoption of formal specification languages in industry is impeded by the lack of support for early development phases and for integration with older, legacy software. Methodology aimed at improving this situation is presented. The methodology uses message sequence charts as a “front-end” specification language and systematically applies an automatic synthesis technique to produce executable specifications in the telecommunications standard Specification and Description Language. Applications of the automatic synthesis technique for both forward and reverse engineering are demonstrated.