ON THE USE OF LOGICAL ABDUCTION IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

In this paper, we survey recent work on the use of abduction as a knowledge-based reasoning technique for analyzing software specifications. We present a general overview of logical abduction and describe two abductive reasoning techniques, developed from the logic and expert system communities. We then focus on two applications of abduction in software engineering, namely, analysis and revision of specifications. Specifically, we discuss and illustrate, with examples, how the above two abductive reasoning techniques can be deployed to reason about specifications, detect errors, such as logical inconsistencies, provide diagnostic information about these errors, and identify (possible) changes to revise incorrect specifications. We then conclude with a discussion of open research issues.