Program plan recognition for Year 2000 tools

Abstract

There are many commercial tools that address various aspects of the Year 2000 problem. None of these tools, however, make any documented use of plan-based techniques for automated concept recovery. This implies a general perception that plan-based techniques are not useful for this problem. The paper argues that this perception is incorrect and these techniques are in fact mature enough to make a significant contribution. In particular, the authors show representative code fragments illustrating "Year 2000" problems, discuss the problems inherent in recognizing the higher level concepts these fragments implement using pattern-based and rule-based techniques, demonstrate that they can be represented in a programming plan framework, and present some initial experimental evidence that suggests that current algorithms can locate these plans in linear time. Finally, they discuss several ways to integrate plan-based techniques with existing Year 2000 tools.