Rational SDL Suite

Features and benefits

IBM® Rational® SDL Suite™ is a real-time, software development tool that provides communications software specification and software development capabilities for complex, event-driven communications systems described using the ITU-T Specification and Description Language (SDL) standard.

Navigate from high-level specifications to detailed behavior

The SDL Editor is a modern, graphical, drag-and-drop editor with a context-sensitive online help facility. You can easily navigate from high-level specifications to detailed behavior by double-clicking the symbols you want to investigate. An analyzer performs an online check and immediately highlights any detected static syntactic or semantic errors directly in the editor.

Describe typical scenarios with a visual trace language

The MSC Editor is a graphical tool for handling Message Sequence Charts (MSCs), supporting the graphical notation defined in the standard Z.120. The charts are used early in the development process as use cases. Later, automatically generated MSCs serve as a powerful graphical trace tool when simulating a system specified in SDL. The SDL Explorer can take an MSC that you create and test it against your SDL system to find out whether or not your MSC describes a possible behavior in your system.

High-level Message Sequence Charts (HMSCs) - or "Road maps" as they sometimes are called - give users the possibility of building hierarchies of MSCs. Instead of drawing different MSCs for situations where perhaps just a single condition separates two cases, an HMSC can be drawn that describes alternative paths.

Simulate to prove your concept

IBM® Rational® SDL Suite offers a rich set of tools for simulation both for verification and for validation. Verification is performed not only through static analysis, as described above, but also through an automatic exhaustive exploration of the SDL specification and all included C code. This is done by testing all possible execution paths of the SDL system, during which a number of rules are checked and violations reported, such as deadlocks, loops, and exceeded queue length. The result of the verification is presented as an easy-to-follow tree view.

In the validation phase, you confirm that the system does exactly what it is supposed to and nothing else. You can simulate in batch or in interactive mode through a graphical user interface. It is also possible to connect it to another SDL system or to a TTCN test suite. You can monitor the progress of the simulation graphically and set breakpoints at your convenience. Another of the major application areas of the validation tool is to verify that an SDL system is consistent with an MSC use case by checking whether or not there is a possible execution path that satisfies the MSC. This provides a powerful way to match your system behavior against a requirements specification.

Ensure early feedback from customers on user interface design

The integration between SDL Suite and GUI simulators allows developers and product managers to get high-quality customer involvement and feedback at an early stage.

Ensure stakeholder feedback through rapid creation of visual prototypes

Project success in systems and software development increasingly depends upon getting early feedback from stakeholders. But getting quality feedback on static textual specifications is difficult. Running prototypes of typical scenarios ensure real involvement, but prototyping with traditional development tools is costly. IBM Rational offers a unique solution to this challenge: the IBM® Rational® SDL Suite™ MSC to SDL Synthesizer, which allows rapid creation of executable applications from high-level scenarios, expressed using the industry-standard Message Sequence Charts (MSC). The new technology automatically translates easy-to-read formalized use case scenarios to complete software systems, which can be simulated and validated using the built-in capabilities of SDL Suite.

The IBM® Rational® SDL Suite MSC to SDL Synthesizer provides a springboard for developing state machine models. Focused on the requirements capture and validation phases of software development, it uses scenario language as the input for the modeling process and automatically transforms scenarios into executable state machines. Use it to validate models of your system and avoid snowballing incorrect decisions that can result from incomplete or incorrect requirements.

Simulate live performance

The Performance Simulator is available for running simulations of a performance model (specified in SDL) to obtain estimates about the SDL system's performance. The Performance Simulation Library is specially designed to execute performance simulations and does not include the monitor system, and thus, executes on the order of 30 to 40 times faster than the standard Simulation Library.

Deploy your system visually

The Deployment Editor is the first step towards full support to distributing an SDL system over several targets. It enables a graphical description of how the system runs physically and provides the documentation simultaneously. Based on UML diagrams, the Deployment Editor gives a complete overview of the SDL entities in the run-time environment and the communication between them. The automatic code generation to build script ensures that the system is built according to the defined partitioning.

The Targeting Expert offers a user-friendly way to set compilation and integration parameters that simplify and speed up the actual application generation. In the Targeting Expert, the system - or parts of it - can be compiled automatically to executable applications. Depending upon the selected code generator, the process of targeting is completely or partially supported. The Targeting Expert includes several ready-to-use configurations for targeting, which can easily be modified or extended if needed.

Generate executable code without writing a line

When the simulators have convinced you that your system is correct, it is time to generate the final application. The SDL compiler automatically translates from SDL to C/C++ environments. It is exactly the same generated C code that is used in simulations as in the applications, ensuring consistency between the tested system and its implementation.

IBM® Rational® SDL Suite offers two SDL compilers: one is an unrestricted C code generator that supports generation of any kind of executable code. The other C code generator is optimized for smaller embedded systems, where code efficiency, minimum memory demands, and high performance are especially required.

Flexible integrations with other languages

The IBM® Rational® SDL Suite allows interfacing to C and C++ code in a powerful and flexible manner, and included code can be analyzed and simulated.

Unique support for key UMTS/IMT-2000 standards

As decided on by 3GPP, UMTS is the standard for third generation mobile telephony. By supporting SDL, MSC, and TTCN, as well as Extended ASN.1 and PER encoding, IBM® Rational® SDL Suite and IBM® Rational® TTCN Suite encompass all the important languages and techniques mentioned in the UMTS standard, allowing you to automatically generate code for UMTS applications.

This provides a unique tool solution for developing UMTS communications devices, which enables you to be first-to-market with newly developed UMTS products and services. The support allows you to import SDL and TTCN descriptions directly from the UMTS standard documents. It also saves you invaluable time as the Extended ASN.1 data syntax from the UMTS standard can be directly used, and then automatically encoded and decoded according to Basic Unaligned PER (Packet Encoding Rules) as defined in the standard.

ASN.1 BER/PER encoding and decoding

Available for both the IBM® Rational® SDL Suite and IBM® Rational® TTCN Suite, this much asked-for feature enables you to convert the abstract ASN.1 data format to an actual bitstream. The tool supports the most common of rule sets, the Basic Encoding Rules (BER) as well as the 3G standard, Basic Unaligned PER (Packet Encoding Rules).

This utility saves development teams invaluable time during the test and deployment stages of real-time systems in mixed environments. It also allows you to use the encoding engine to create custom encoding and decoding rules.

Integrate with your target environment

When it is time to let your application run in the target environment, the tools of IBM® Rational® SDL Suite are open enough to make the procedure simple. Legacy C and C++ code can be included in the SDL application in various ways.

The SDL compilers include run-time libraries in source code that make it possible to develop portable applications that can be executed on any machine with a suitable C compiler. The same SDL structure is adapted to different architectures simply by choosing the appropriate template. Thus, you have a free choice between mono-tasking, multi-tasking, or distributed systems, including CORBA. Both the integration and the compilation of your system are simplified by the setting of target parameters in the Targeting Expert.

Communication with the environment is made flexible through a general and open framework for ASN.1-based encoding and decoding, giving you the benefit of automatically generated connections to the environment.

Choose your level of integration

Depending upon your application, one of several OS integration levels may be most suitable:

Tight integration in which the generated code interfaces directly with your run-time operating system so that scheduling of SDL processes, memory management, timer handling, and so on are all customized and handled by the OS.
Bare integration in which the generated code runs on the SDL Runtime Kernel, although you must write functions to handle signals to and from the environment of the SDL system. The signaling could, for example, be translated to socket communication.
Light integration that in reality constitutes any level in-between the tight and bare integrations.

Test your micro system hardware

The SDL Target Tester is used on the target hardware to trace the activity of the system on an SDL level and to run test suites by sending both environment and internal signals into the system. It is also possible to create and store error traces that can be used to diagnose a problem that occurs with a product when not connected to the host system in a field test for example.

Generate your TTCN test suites

In IBM® Rational® SDL Suite, test suite generation is supported by two tools: Autolink and SDL to TTCN Link. These provide an integrated SDL/TTCN environment with access to specifications in SDL directly from the TTCN test case editor. Autolink generates the constraints and dynamic behavior tables of your TTCN test suite. SDL to TTCN Link automatically generates the static parts of the test suite and gives specification-based support for the test case design. The tool also provides a means to check the consistency between an SDL system managed by SDL Suite and a test specification expressed in TTCN and managed by IBM® Rational® TTCN Suite.

Regression testing, a powerful method of checking that old functionality still works when an SDL system has been updated, is also possible in the SDL Suite. You can run MSC test cases, and if there are any inconsistencies between your SDL system and the MSCs, the errors are pointed out in the summary presented after the operation.

Regression testing using MSCs allows you to:

Send signals to the SDL system and check returned signals
Check if a process instance exists
Check if process instance x is in state y
Check process instance variable values

Application support capabilities

You can integrate SDL systems developed with IBM® Rational® SDL Suite with any operating system or kernel for automatic generation of complete real-time applications. The standard delivery supports the following systems:

Nucleus (Accelerated Technologies)
OSE (Enea OSE Systems)
Solaris (Sun Microsystems)
VxWorks (WindRiver Systems)
Win32 (Microsoft)

IBM® Rational® SDL Suite supports the POSIX interface to allow easy integration with any POSIX-compliant operating system.

Integrations with AMX, Chorus, EPOC, HyperStone, Lynx, MicroITRON, OSEK, pSOS, QNX, REOS, Virtuoso, VRTX, Windows CE, and several other operating systems are available as specialized packages.

Full development cycle IBM® Rational® DOORS integration

IBM® Rational® SDL Suite and IBM® Rational® TTCN Suite offer a complete IBM® Rational® DOORS integration, which allows you to easily synchronize your work with the requirements documents, such as when new requirements have been added or if design elements have been added or deleted. The DOORS integration in SDL Suite and TTCN Suite delivers unique benefits because it allows you to trace requirements across the full development cycle all the way from analysis to test. It becomes easy to check that a particular requirement has been covered by SDL design, MSC simulation scenarios, and finally TTCN test cases.

Integration with IBM® Rational® Rhapsody

When active, this integration allows System Blocks in IBM® Rational® SDL Suite to be visible to IBM® Rational® Rhapsody allowing both tools to exchange message and data. Protocol and domain-specific models continue to be managed as SDL models, while, general, real-time and embedded objects are created in IBM® Rational® Rhapsody.

Automated document generation

IBM® Rational® DocExpress provides automated reporting and documentation services for the IBM® Rational® SDL Suite, IBM® Rational® TTCN Suite, and IBM® Rational® DOORS products.