An open animation tool: application to telecommunication systems
This paper presents an animation environment based on an open and flexible architecture. Its flexible architecture allows animating different animation sources (formal and executable language like SDL or scenario languages like MSC or UML sequence diagrams). The animation multimedia user interface allows integrating different multimedia objects and different types of representations.This animation environment has been intensively used for telecommunication applications at different levels of a service and network architecture: service animation from the user's point of view or from the service logic point of view (service logic and service feature logics), protocols and application programming interface (such as OSA/PARLAY) animation, service interaction analysis. Animation helps obtaining a comprehensive and user-friendly interface for education, and investigation of system behaviour from different points of view, in particular from a client point of view. Specifically applied to formal executable models (using SDL, for example), the tool helps checking properties of the system behaviour, and showing whether it really fulfils user expectations.