Expressing program requirements using refinement lattices

Abstract

Requirements capture is a term used in software engineering, referring to the process of obtaining a problem description—a high level account of the problem which a user wants to solve. This description is then used to control the generation of a program appropriate to the solution of this problem. Reliable requirements capture is seen as a key component of future automated program construction systems, since even small amounts of information about the type of problem being tackled can often vastly reduce the space of appropriate application programs. Many special purpose requirements capture systems exist but few of these are logic based and all of them operate in tightly constrained domains. This paper introduces a formal language for requirements capture which bridges the gap between an order sorted logic of problem description and the Prolog programming language. An extended version of this paper appears in [4].