We present a logic and logic programming based approach for analysing event-based requirements specifications given in terms of a system’s reaction to events and safety properties. The approach uses a variant of Kowalski and Sergot’s Event Calculus to represent such specifications declaratively and an abductive reasoning mechanism for analysing safety properties. Given a system description and a safety property, the abductive mechanism is able to identify a complete set of counterexamples (if any exist) of the property in terms of symbolic “current ” states and associated event-based transitions. A case study of an automobile cruise control system specified in the SCR framework is used to illustrate our approach. The technique described is implemented using existing tools for abductive logic programming.

In order to alleviate design decay, different program design documentation techniques are used for the specification and detection of design inconsistencies in code. However, these design documentation techniques do not always provide support for the diagnosis and (semi-) automatic correction of such inconsistencies. In case they do, corrective solutions are typically targeted to a reduced set of pre-defined inconsistency problems, and they are not easily customizable to new kinds of consistency checks defined by a user. In particular, they cannot infer possible corrective actions to solve new user-defined inconsistency problems. In this paper, we present a technique for the diagnosis and (semi-) automatic correction of inconsistencies in the context of an existing tool for inconsistency management: IntensiVE. Our technique uses logic abductive reasoning to infer solutions to detected user-defined inconsistencies, starting from basic composable corrective actions. A first prototype implementing our technique on top of IntensiVE is shown.

Back in the 1980s, the model-based diagnosis (MBD) community explored qualitative representations [42]. Since they are not overly-specific, such representations can be quickly collected in a new domain. Indeed, in domains where information is limited,