AI (hierarchical

This research was motivated by the widely held belief that constructing an automatic program synthesis system that can accept a high-level description of a problem for an arbitrary domain and generate code for the problem completely automatically is pragmatically impossible. However, by focusing on a well-defined domain, it is possible to incorporate sufficient knowledge within a system so that it can communicate with an end user at the level of his(her) application and automatically generate a program from a problem specification. Such knowledge-based systems often employ a catalog of transformational rules that progressively refine an abstract specification into a concrete implementation. A major research issue in such systems is how to increase the efficiency of the systems by controlling the application of rules and avoiding repetitive traversal of the search space. In my Ph.D. dissertation (Bhansali 1991), I develop an integrated knowledge-based framework for efficiently synthesizing programs by bringing together ideas from the fields of software engineering (software reuse, domain modeling) and The knowledge base consists of three subcomponents: a concept dictionary, a library of reusable components, and a layered rule base.