Prolog for industrial software development1

The paper describes the results of a project specifically designed to evaluate the utility of Prolog for industrial software production. The project was financed by the IBM Canada Laboratory and the work was done by the University of Montréal in collaboration with the Computer Research Institute of Montréal (CRIM). Initially, the objective was to compare the industrial implementation of a telecommunications protocol with one developed in Prolog directly from the defining standard documents. The application chosen was an IBM software product in the last phases of development: MMS, the Manufacturing Messaging System of the Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP) a protocol designed for the interconnection of robots, machine tools and computers in highly automated factories. It was hoped that the Prolog system could be designed as an executable description which could function both as a workable prototype and as a model for the validation and the testing of other MMS implementations. Early in the project, another application of Prolog's particular strengths became apparent. Noting that about half of the manpower on project such as MMS was devoted to product testing, we concentrated on developing tools to improve productivity in this area and developed a suite of general tools which could be used, not only for the MMS project, but for other products as well. This new research direction proved more fruitful than the original plan and, since the end of the project, the Prolog tools developed on the MMS project have been used in production on other development projects. The main conclusion of the MMS project was Prolog knowledge-based techniques are efficient and robust enough to be used for production in an industrial context. The paper also comment on the particular strengths and weaknesses of Prolog that we observed during the project. 1 Presented at the International Conference on the Practical Application of PROLOG, London, 1st-3rd April 1992 (sponsored by the Association for Logic Programming). J. Vaucher et al. Prolog for industrial software development