Applying Formal Methods in Automated Software Development

Research into the development of software tools that support formal methods is aimed at simplifying and providing assistance during the development of correct software. This paper describes the development of the Seed system, which demonstrates that the building blocks of a software system can be correctly synthesized from user-supplied formal speci cations using techniques amenable to automation. Seed accepts a formal speci cation of a problem written in predicate logic and generates annotated program source code satisfying the speci cation. The rules for choosing which programming language structures to synthesize are contained in a rule base; background knowledge and domain-speci c information are entered into a fact base. During synthesis, Seed uses the fact base to disambiguate rule applications. In addition to primitive programming language constructs, such as assignment, alternative and iterative statements, Seed is capable of synthesizing recursive and non-recursive procedures and functions, as well as abstract data types.

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