Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/L23260/01
Title:	A PROBABILISTIC FORMAL METHOD
Principal Investigator:	Sanders, Dr J
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Computer Science
Organisation:	University of Oxford
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	01 August 1997	Ends:	31 January 2001	Value (£):	207,182
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Fundamentals of Computing
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
A formal method provides techniques for structured abstract specification, together with a semantic model and sound techniques for the incremental development of the modularised correct implementations. Such a method incorporating probability would extend the use of formal methods to systems that may fail, systems which stand to benefit most from the use of such methods but which at present lie outside their scope. This project is designed to bring a probabilistic method up to the level of efficacy of standard formal methods. Due to a previous EPSRC project that task has been reduced to: discovery of abstract specification techniques; greater understanding of the interplay between nondeterminism and probability; further investigation of the probabilistic temporal operators and a detailed study of probabilistic data refinement. It is intended to convince industrial information technologists of the utility of the approach (and to benefit from their experience) by demonstrating our methods on case studies capturing the probabilistic aspects of industrial-strength systems. It is hoped to increase the penetration of probabilistic reasoning by showing how simple but powerful arguments can replace many of those used at present to obtain merely partial results concerning fairness, temporal behaviour and other attributes of sequential, concurrent and hybrid systems.
Key Findings
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Potential use in non-academic contexts
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Impacts
Description This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk Summary Date Materialised
Sectors submitted by the Researcher
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Project URL:
Further Information:
Organisation Website:	http://www.ox.ac.uk