Vol. 15 No. 6, © The Author, 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Original Articles |
A Decidable Constraint Diagram Reasoning System
Visual Modelling Group, University of Brighton, Brighton, BN2 4GJ, UK Email: g.e.stapleton{at}brighton.ac.uk, john.howse{at}brighton.ac.uk, john.taylor{at}brighton.ac.uk
Constraint diagrams are a visual notation designed for use by software engineers to formally specify information systems. In this paper we formalize a fragment of the constraint diagram language. A set of reasoning rules are defined and we prove that this set is both sound and complete. Given constraint diagrams D1 and D2 such that D2 is a semantic consequence of D1, to prove completeness we construct a proof of D2 from D1. A decision procedure can be extracted from this proof construction process and it follows that the system is decidable.
Keywords: Visual logic, formal methods, diagrammatic reasoning
Received 25 January 2005.