J.UCS Special Issue on Integration of Deduction Systems

Logic has become a cross-sectional formal speci cation language for applications in Arti cial Intelligence, Computing, and Mathematics. Deduction is the corresponding derivation mechanism used to execute and analyse formal models, to predict properties, to generate plans or to detect errors. For about 35 years, researchers have developed di erent kinds of computational logics, calculi and computer programs for interactive and fully automated deduction. In contemporary design of deduction systems there is a clearly observable trend away from monolithic systems towards building integrated tools. Thus the combinatorial power of fully automatic theorem provers might enhance the reasoning abilities of interactive speci cation and veri cation tools. Also, real world deduction problems tend to be so complex that no single methodology is likely to be successful. Though some high degree of maturity has been reached in various sub elds of automated deduction, the obstacles to integration are still non-trivial and diverse. The aim of this special issue is to archive the state-ofthe-art achieved in integration of deductive systems. The idea for this special issue goes back to a workshop on 'Integration of Deduction Systems', held in conjunction with the International Conference on Automated Deduction 1998 (CADE), in Lindau, Germany. The large number of high quality submissions, and the very positive resonance to this largest satellite workshop of CADE 98 encouraged us to edit this special issue. We received 13 submissions that underwent a careful review process. Based on 33 review reports we selected six regular papers, and two contributions that have the avour of system descriptions. These are the papers Integrating Tps and mega by C. Benzm uller, M. Bishop, and V. Sorge, and Interactive Veri cation Environments for Object-Oriented Programs by J. Meyer, and A. Poetzsch-He ter. The papers of this issue address the following integration topics: