Experimenting a temporal logic for executable specifications in an engineering domain

This paper reports the results of an experiment with a logical specification language on an engineering case study. The proposed language extends the Event Calculus formalism with primitives for modeling context-dependency and discrete processes. In particular, it introduces a number of process constructors that provide a way of packaging related events into individual, conceptual chunks. It has been implemented on a Sun SPARC2 with Quintus Prolog and used to write executable specifications of a gas heater system. The paper discusses in detail the problems encountered in executing the calculus with Prolog.