From Constraints to Commands: Graph Predicate Differentiation in 4-Valued First-Order Logic

By: Attila Ficsor, Inez Anna Papp, Kristóf Marussy, Oszkár Semeráth

Abstract

During the early phase of modeling, our knowledge about the model under development is frequently partial. Partial modeling technologies enable the explicit representation of partial knowledge, which allows developers to consider design alternatives, and manage uncertainties and potential contradictions. However, partial modeling is challenging, as models need to adhere to design rules and well-formedness constraints, which are complex logic predicates. Therefore, during manual and automated model refinement, it is important to exclude design alternatives that violate such constraints as early as possible to reduce the number of invalid design decisions. In this paper, we propose a technique to translate well-formedness constraints to propagation rules, which are logic reasoning steps that can exclude invalid design alternatives automatically. Thus, propagation rules can reduce the number of apparent design decisions to improve the productivity of development. Moreover, by applying propagation rules during automated generation of design alternatives, the proposed technique can improve the performance of logic solvers significantly. We integrated the proposed technique to the Refinery graph generation framework, and illustrated the performance improvement with case studies.

Keywords

Partial modeling, Graph generation, Graph predicates, Graph transformation, Logic inference

Cite as:

Attila Ficsor, Inez Anna Papp, Kristóf Marussy, Oszkár Semeráth, “From Constraints to Commands: Graph Predicate Differentiation in 4-Valued First-Order Logic”, Journal of Object Technology, Volume 25, no. 3 ( 2026), pp. 3:43-56, doi:10.5381/jot.2026.25.3.a4.