The Grim Reaper: a Process Agent to Facilitate Entailment for Speciication Reenement

Speciication reenement is part of formal program derivation, a method by which software is directly constructed from a provably correct spe-ciication. Because program derivation is an intensive manual exercise used for critical software systems, an automated approach would allow it to be viable for many other types of software systems. The goal of this research is to determine if genetic programming (GP) can be used to automate the speciication reenement process. The initial steps toward this goal are to show that a well{known proof logic for program derivation can be encoded such that a GP{based system can infer sentences in the logic for proof of a particular sentence. The results are promising and indicate that GP can be useful in aiding program derivation.