There has been much recent interest in synthesis algorithms that generate finite state machines from scenarios of intended system behavior. One of the uses of such algorithms is in the transition from requirements scenarios to design. Despite much theoretical work on the nature of these algorithms, there has been very little work on applying the algorithms to practical applications. In this paper, we apply the Whittle & Schumann synthesis algorithm [32] to a component of an air traffic advisory system under development at NASA Ames Research Center. We not only apply the algorithm to generate state machine designs from scenarios but also show how to generate code from the generated state machines using existing commercial code generation tools. The results demonstrate the possibility of generating application code directly from scenarios of system behavior.
This was the first paper to empirically validate techniques for synthesizing finite state machines from requirements scenarios. These synthesis techniques were the subject of great academic interest (including 6 ICSE workshops devoted to the topic) but no industrial validation existed before this paper. The empirical evaluation was undertaken in collaboration with NASA on a real-world air traffic control subsystem. An earlier, shorter version was published in 2003's ICSE. Publication of the case study in this paper led to at least a dozen workshop and conference papers which also used the case study in validation experiments. RAE_import_type : Journal article RAE_uoa_type : Computer Science and Informatics
