Synthesis revisited: Generating statechart models from scenario-based requirements

Constructing a program from a specification is a long-known general and fundamental problem. Besides its theoretical interest, this question also has practical implications, since finding good synthesis algorithms could bring about a major improvement in the reliable development of complex systems. In this paper we describe a methodology for synthesizing statechart models from scenario-based requirements. The requirements are given in the language of live sequence charts (LSCs), and may be played in directly from the GUI, and the resulting statecharts are of the object-oriented variant, as adopted in the UML. We have implemented our algorithms as part of the Play-Engine tool and the generated statechart model can then be executed using existing UML case tools.