INVERTED DECISION TABLES AND THEIR APPLICATION: AUTOMATING THE TRANSLATION OF SPECIFICATIONS TO PROGRAMS.

Code generation techniques are used to program an application characterized by complexity arising from many special cases, and rapid changes due to advances in the state of the art. A formal notation - an inverted decision table written in a propositional logic form - is developed as a means for allowing expert users to describe the application in a knowledge base that code generators then can use to create production code. The complete system described in the paper automatically transforms a one thousand-page specification into a running program. The development of this system is an example of the formalization of the specification of a complex application. In this case the application is a part of the Job Management Operations System, an operational support system to aid regional Bell Operating Company construction and engineering processes. The techniques described, however, can be generalized.