Generative sequence diagrams for requirements specification in real-time systems

Summary form only given, as follows. Sequence diagrams have proven useful for describing scenarios, which are widely used to elicit system requirements. However, their weak expression for control flow and real-time behavior reduces their suitability for practical real-time applications. To overcome these drawbacks, we have extended these diagrams with generative mechanisms to deal with temporal behavior, concurrency, and hierarchy that are fundamental aspects of real-time systems. We show that when used in requirements specification, our generative style of sequence diagrams is more appropriate, making the requirement models both simpler and more expressiveness, easy to understand and more suitable to real-time systems.