Abductive approach to prototyping data flow diagrams

In this paper, we propose to develop prototypes of data flow diagrams using a logical framework, which is based on an extension of logic programming to perform abductive reasoning (abductive logic programming). Based on the framework, we discuss how to represent a data flow diagram in a declarative manner as a set of logical sentences and outline a proof procedure. Given the declarative representation of a data flow diagram, the proof procedure can be applied, which combines forward and backward chaining in a structured manner. Unlike the conventional logic programming, the computed answers are abducible atoms directly representing the outputs. When restricting to the use of pure Prolog, we provide the semantics of the outputs under the abductive logical framework and show the soundness and completeness of the proof procedure. We compare our approach with conventional backward chaining and finally discuss some further enhancements.