Race conditions in message sequence charts

Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) are a graphical language for the description of scenarios in terms of message exchanges between communicating components in a distributed environment. The language has been standardised by the ITU and given a formal semantics by means of a process algebra. In this paper, we review a design anomaly, called race condition, in an MSC specification and argue that the current solution correcting race conditions is too weak when implementation is considered. In this paper, we provide an algorithm on partial orders as our solution. The result is a strengthened partial order, which is race-free and remains race-free in the implementation