Flexible control mechanism in a consistency maintenance system

An attempt is being made to develop an intelligent software development environment that extends the capabilities of current CASE (computer-aided software engineering) tools. The approach used is based on identifying and representing knowledge from multiple domains and using that knowledge to assist software designers in designing software systems. A prototype system called KASE is currently being developed that is based on this approach. The authors describe the consistency checking mechanism in KASE which can be used to assist software developers in ensuring the correctness and completeness of a software design. Three new features are introduced for the consistency checking mechanism: integrated consistency checking, flexible control of consistency checking and automatic remedy generation. Flexible control of consistency checking is emphasized in the present work. It is believed that these features can overcome some of the limitations of current CASE tools