IMDEA Software Institute faculty members Pedro López and Manuel Hermenegildo are, with co-authors Jorge Navas (SRI) and Edison Mera (PDC), the recipients of the 10 year Test of Time Award at the 33rd International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2017), the premier conference in the area, for their paper “User-Definable Resource Bounds Analysis for Logic Programs”, published in ICLP 2007. The 10 year Test of Time Award recognizes the paper published 10 years ago which has had the largest impact.

The winning paper by Navas, Mera, López-García, and Hermenegildo proposed and developed a technique that allows programmers to implement analysis and verification tools for a very wide class of resources (including execution time, energy consumption, and other user-defined quantitative properties) in a straightforward way, by just defining these resources and other parameters through simple program annotations. The program together with these annotations and resource specifications constitute the input to a customizable analyzer (implemented within the CiaoPP tool) which automatically, and without running the program, predicts the usage of the resources defined in order to guarantee that the program’s resource usage will be within the specified limits.

Since its proposal in 2007 the approach and its implementation in CiaoPP have been applied by different groups for computing upper and lower bound functions on resources such as memory consumption, execution time, or energy, for a wide variety of programming languages, ranging from high-level source to bytecode and to machine code. It has also been improved, extended, and generalized in several ways over the last 10 years.