Deductive Composition of Astronomical Software from Subroutine Libraries

Automated deduction techniques are being used in a system called Amphion to derive, from graphical specifications, programs composed from a subroutine library. The system has been applied to construct software for the planning and analysis of interplanetary missions. The library for that application is a collection of subroutines written in FORTRAN-77 at JPL to perform computations in solar-system kinematics. An application domain theory has been developed that describes the procedures in a portion of the library, as well as some basic properties of solar-system astronomy, in the form of first-order axioms.