On the notion of compliance in critiquing intelligent design assistants: representing duty and contrary-to-duty statements

This paper is part of an investigation into formal and operational models of the notion of compliance between a design and a body of regulatory design knowledge. Design compliance is defined here on the basis of database integrity. The paper provides a formal model of design compliance, based on the assumption that designs are representable as Horn clauses with negation in the body and design rules are representable as denials in first order logic (FOL). This model has been implemented in aiDA, a prototype of a critiquing intelligent design assistant developed for this research. Unfortunately, FOL does not provide adequate representational support for all the statement structures that occur in real bodies of regulatory design knowledge. Some statements require different logic forms and, for these, the definition of compliance has to be reconsidered. This paper presents a motivation for formalising design regulations, an overview of what has so far been done by using first order logic, and a new extension of the mechanism to duty and contrary-to-duty statements. The results draw on results in database systems and normative reasoning.