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This paper summarizes our experience in the Programmer's Apprentice project in applying knowledge representation and automated reasoning to support software development. We describe a system, called Cake, that comprises seven layers of knowledge representation and reasoning facilities: truth maintenance, Boolean constraint propagation, equality, types, algebra, frames, and Plan Calculus. We also include sessions with two experimental software development tools implemented using Cake: the Requirements Apprentice and the Debugging Assistant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commercially available database systems do not meet the information and processing needs of design and manufacturing environments. A new generation of systems-engineering Information systems-must be built to meet these needs. In this paper, we address the architectural and computational aspects of such systems and propose solutions. We argue that a mainframe-workstation architecture is needed to provide distributed functionality while ensuring high availability and low communication overhead, that explicit control of meta-knowledge is needed to support extendibility and evolution, that large rule bases are needed to make the knowledge of the systems active, and that incremental computation models are needed to achieve the required performance of such engineering information systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shankar and Lam propose a projection method for protocol verification. They claim that the method guarantees the faithfulness of the safety and liveness properties of a protocol system. Although not clearly defined, "faithfulness" (as implied in many places in their article) means "the image protocol system is live (respectively, safe) if and only if the original protocol system is live (respectively, safe)." This paper shows that the "only if" part is not true for certain liveness properties and suggests a remedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]