Specification criticism via goal-directed envisionment

Validating a complex system specification is a difficult problem. Generating behaviors and using them to critique a specification is one effective approach. Up until now, symbolic evaluation has been the key technique of behavior generation. Unfortunately, it has drawbacks both in the amount of time it takes to complete a symbolic run, and in the large amount of uninteresting data it produces. The authors propose goal-directed envisionment as an alternative to symbolic evaluation, supplementing the basic envisioning techniques of qualitative physics with behavioral goals. This approach overcomes the problems of symbolic evaluation by generating interpretations in a reasonable amount of time and by exploiting goals to prioritize and analyze the interpretations. The authors describe and evaluate SC, an implemented system which employs goal-directed envisionment to critique specifications