Analyzing the logical structure of data flow diagrams in software documents

Abstract

Understanding software documents requires the logical structure analysis of diagrammatic notations, such as data flow diagrams. A data flow diagram (DFD) represents the functional dependencies within a system: it shows how output values in a computation are derived from input values. We show how the logical structure of a DFD can be described using the formalism of Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS). We present the process of generating the logical structure, and show how the formalism is used for deep understanding of DFDs. Using the Edinburgh Concurrency Workbench (CWB), we can use the formal description of a DFD to reason about the equivalence of two DFDs, and to simulate the behavior of a DFD.