Special Issue of Acta Informatica on Horn Clauses for Verification and Synthesis

The aim of this special issue is to collect state of the art research on Constrained Horn Clauses (CHCs). Many program verification and synthesis problems of interest can be modeled directly using Horn clauses, and many recent advances in Constrained Logic Programming and Computer Aided Verification have centered around efficiently solving problems presented as Horn clauses. Thus, CHCs are an enabling technology for state of the art verification and synthesis techniques. CHCs are relevant for several communities like Constraint / Logic Programming, Program Verification, and Automated Deduction.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the use of Horn clauses, constraints, and related formalisms in the following areas: - Analysis and verification of programs and systems of various kinds (e.g., imperative, object-oriented, functional, logic, higher-order, concurrent, transition systems, petri-nets, smart contracts) - Program synthesis - Program testing - Program transformation - Constraint solving - Type systems - Machine learning and automated reasoning - CHC encoding of analysis and verification problems - Resource analysis - Case studies and tools - Challenging problems.