Automated Procedure Construction for Deductive Synthesis

Abstract

Deductive program synthesis systems based on automated theorem proving offer the promise of software that is correct by construction. However, the difficulty encountered in constructing usable deductive synthesis systems has prevented their widespread use. Amphion is a real-world, domain-independent, completely automated program synthesis system. It is specialized to specific applications through the creation of an operational domain theory and a specialized deductive engine. This paper describes an experiment aimed at making the construction of usable Amphion applications easier.The software system Theory Operationalization for Program Synthesis (TOPS) has a library of decision procedure templates with a theory schema for each procedure. TOPS identifies sets of axioms in the domain theory that are instances of theory schema associated with library procedures. For each procedure instance, TOPS uses iterated partial deduction to augment the procedure with the capability to construct ground terms for deductive synthesis. Synthesized procedures are interfaced to a resolution theorem prover. Axioms in the original domain theory that are implied by the synthesized procedures are removed.The inference rules of the theorem prover have been extended so that during deductive synthesis, each procedure is invoked to test conjunctions of literals in the language of the theory of that procedure. When possible, the procedure generates ground terms and binds them to variables in a problem specification. These terms are program fragments. Experiments show that the procedures synthesized by TOPS can reduce theorem proving search at least as much as hand tuning of the deductive synthesis system.

Program synthesis from Workflow-Driven Ontologies

“…A common difficulty with first order logic arises from the search space explosion. Techniques for procedural attachment have been developed [24,25], as have techniques for automatically generating domain-specific decision procedures for subsets of domain theories [26]. Applying these types of techniques to extract workflow specifications from WDO ontologies is left as future work along with investigation of more sophisticated ontological relations for use in the WDO approach.…”

From program synthesis to optimal program synthesis

“…We can therefore use logical deduction tools to check whether y is deducible from x i ; see, e.g., [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [19], [20].…”

“…The logical deduction tools have been used to automate program synthesis in space missions such as the NASA Cassini mission to Saturn; see, e.g., [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [20].…”

Designing Security Requirements Models Through Planning

“…Almost fifty years ago the idea of actually deriving code directly from the specification (such as that advocated in [22]) started a large programme for deductive program synthesis, 1 that is still active now [5,11,25,29]. However, proposed solutions are largely domain-specific, require considerable expertise on the part of their users, and in some cases do not actually guarantee that the synthesized program will meet all requirements stated up front [11].…”