  Interaction languages such as MSC are often associated with formal semantics
by means of translations into distinct behavioral formalisms such as automatas
or Petri nets. In contrast to translational approaches we propose an
operational approach. Its principle is to identify which elementary
communication actions can be immediately executed, and then to compute, for
every such action, a new interaction representing the possible continuations to
its execution. We also define an algorithm for checking the validity of
execution traces (i.e. whether or not they belong to an interaction's
semantics). Algorithms for semantic computation and trace validity are analyzed
by means of experiments.
