AUTOMATIC, RAPID GENERATION OF DESIGN PROTOTYPES FROM LOGIC SPECIFICATIONS

Abstract

This article is on a methodology for eliciting and verifying the correctness of domain knowledge using propositional logic. The domain knowledge is further structured and organized into subdomains of objects to facilitate an automatic and rapid development of design prototypes. The philosophy of the design paradigm is threefold: 1) focus the development of software requirements specifications on a set of objects and a set of relationships; 2) establish theorems about the interrelationships of the objects, prove the correctness of the theorems, construct software architectural models based on the transitivity of the theorems, and decompose the models into clusters of objects; and 3) employ object-oriented design techniques to generate prototypes of object classes from the resultant clusters. A prototype generator has been implemented to realize these goals. The significant contributions of this paper are: 1) limiting the contents of the specifications to objects and relationships and mapping this dual basis approach into formalisms of logic to derive and verify the abstract interdependencies of the objects; and 2) modeling, decomposing, and clustering the objects into common classes to facilitate a modular design.