MSC'96 and beyond - a critical look

Publisher Summary This chapter outlines the deficiencies and inconsistencies within the semantics and graphical syntax of the new message sequence chart’96 (MSC’96) concepts. The chapter aims to exhibit open questions and conflicts within the new MSC’96 standard, and present possible solutions. The chapter emphasizes the development of new structural concepts: generalized ordering, new formulation of instance decomposition, inline expression, MSC references, gates, and high-level MSCs. In contrast to MSC’92, the new standard MSC’96 offers promising possibility of a fairly comprehensive system specification in an intuitive and transparent manner. In this respect, MSC’96 has been applied successfully to an Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) service specification and to the formalization of Use Cases. Practical experience has been gained by the implementation of one of the new MSC’96 concepts as a prototype component within the Siemens SICAT tool.