AXIOMATIC SPECIFICATION AND LOGIC PROGRAMMING - FAST PROTOTYPING OF CORRECT DESIGNS

This paper discusses formal specification as an important tool for for mulating and validating designs, presents an algebraic specification o f selected aspects of the design of a SCADA communications protocol fi rst - specifically a command and data logger -, compares and highlight s the advantages of logic programming over procedural programming in t ranslating a design based on set theory and logic into an equivalent d eclarative implementation, and finally illustrates the translation pro cess by a specific SCADA-related example coded in Prolog, the latter s howing itself to be a useful tool for fast prototyping of software spe cifications previously proved correct.