Patent ID: 7620946

Claim:
A computer implemented method for constructing a system dependence graph for a unified specification, said unified specification comprising a description of behavior in terms of a multitude of operations, organized as one or more processes that represent concurrent behavior, each of said processes specified as one or more procedures, each of said procedures specified as a sequential flow of control between operations and each of said procedures containing one entry operation, said entry operation being a control predicate operation that models procedure activation, comprising the steps of: (a) for each procedure in said unified specification, constructing a procedure dependence graph, where each node in said procedure dependence graph corresponds to an operation in said unified specification and each edge in said procedure dependence graph corresponds to a dependence relation between two operations in the same procedure; (b) connecting said procedure dependence graphs by introducing a plurality of interprocedural edges, said interprocedural edges representing interprocedural dependences, where each said interprocedural edge is labeled with a type comprising call, return, param-in, and param-out; (c) connecting said procedure dependence graphs by introducing a plurality of interprocess edges, said interprocess edges representing interprocess dependences, each of said interprocess edges connecting a source node and a target node that represent concurrent operations; (d) storing the system dependence graph to an output medium; whereby the multitude of dependence relationships between said operations in said unified specification are explicitly represented.