Probabilistic analysis of the quality calculus

Abstract

We consider a fragment of the Quality Calculus, previously introduced for defensive programming of software components such that it becomes natural to plan for default behaviour in case the ideal behaviour fails due to unreliable communication. This paper develops a probabilistically based trust analysis supporting the Quality Calculus. It uses information about the probabilities that expected input will be absent in order to determine the trustworthiness of the data used for controlling the distributed system; the main challenge is to take accord of the stochastic dependency between some of the inputs. This takes the form of a relational static analysis dealing with quantitative information. © 2013 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.