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Message Sequence Charts (MSC) have been traditionally used to depict
execution scenarios in the early stages of design cycle. MSCs portray
inter-process ( inter-object) interactions. Synthesizing
intra-process (intra-object) executable specifications from an
MSC-based description is a non-trivial task. Here we present a model
called Communicating Transaction Processes} (CTP) based on MSCs
from which an executable specification can be extracted in a
straightforward manner. Our model describes a network of
communicating processes as a collection of high-level labeled
transition systems, where processes interact via common action
labels. Each action is a non-atomic interaction which is described by a
guarded choice of MSCs. Thus our model achieves a separation of
concerns: the high-level transition systems depicting intra-process
control flow, while the actions in the transition system capture
inter-process interaction via MSCs. We show how to extract an ordinary
Petri net from a CTP model thereby leading to a standard operational
semantics. We also discuss the connection of our formalism to Live
Sequence Charts, an extension of MSCs which also has an executable semantic.
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