The Tracer and the related material below are property of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.

The Tracer
 Model-based trace visualization and exploration for reactive systems

The Tracer is a prototype application for the visualization and exploration of the execution traces of reactive systems. It was developed in order to demonstrate and test the ideas first presented in a paper by Maoz, Kleinbort, and Harel, "Towards Trace Visualization and Exploration for Reactive Systems" (VL/HCC'07).   An extended journal version by Maoz and Harel titled "On Tracing Reactive Systems", will appear in Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM). [PDF]

We present a rich and highly dynamic technique for the analysis, visualization, and exploration of the execution traces of reactive systems. The two inputs are a designer's inter-object scenario-based behavioral model, visually described using a UML2-compliant dialect of live sequence charts (LSC), and an execution trace of the system. Our method allows one to visualize, navigate through, and explore, the activation and progress of the scenarios as they "come to life" during execution. Thus, a system's runtime is recorded and viewed through abstractions provided by behavioral models used for its design, tying the visualization and exploration of system execution traces to model-driven engineering. We support both event-based and real-time-based tracing, and use details-on-demand mechanisms, multi-scaling grids, and gradient coloring methods. Novel model exploration techniques include semantics-based navigation, filtering, and trace comparison.

Additional information is provided in the papers (links below).  NEW: Gallery of case studies (links below).
The Gantt views are implemented using the open source jaret timebars.   Many thanks to Peter Kliem.

The first version of the Tracer prototype was designed and programmed by Asaf Kleinbort and Shahar Maoz (2007).  
A second major version was programmed by Evyatar Shoresh (2009).    
The Tracer is developed in Prof. David Harel's lab, Dept. of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.


Related resources are available below.  
 
Publications

S. Maoz and D. Harel. "On Tracing Reactive Systems" Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM).   To appear.  [PDF]

S. Maoz, A. Kleinbort, and D. Harel. "Towards Trace Visualization and Exploration for Reactive Systems"
Proc. IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2007), P. Cox and J. Hosking eds., IEEE Computer Society, September 2007, pages 153-156. [PDF] (Appendices [PDF]).

 
Gallery
Links to case studies:
 
Last updated: November 2010.