Assessing the Role of Formal Specifications in Verification and Validation of Knowledge‑Based Systems

This paper examines how formal specification techniques can support the verification and validation (VandV) of knowledge-based systems. Formal specification techniques provide levels of description which support both verification and validation, and VandV techniques feed back to assist the development of the specifications. Developing a formal specification for a system requires the prior construction of a conceptual model for the intended system. Many elements of this conceptual model can be effectively used to support VandV. Using these elements, the VandV process becomes deeper and more elaborate and it produces results of a better quality compared with the VandV activities which can be performed on systems developed without conceptual models. However, we note that there are concerns in using formal specification techniques for VandV, not least being the effort involved in creating the specifications.

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