Design synthesis from interaction and state-based specifications

Interaction-based and state-based modeling are two complementary approaches of behavior modeling. The former focuses on global interactions between system components. The latter concentrates on the internal states of individual components. Both approaches have been proven useful in practice. One challenging and important research objective is to combine the modeling power of both effectively and then use the combination as the basis for automatic design synthesis. We present a combination of interaction-based and state-based modeling, namely, live sequence charts and Z, for system specification. We then propose a way of generating distributed design from the combinations. Our approach handles systems with intensive interactive behaviors as well as complex state structures.