The probabilistic steam boiler: a case study in probabilistic data refinement

Probabilistic choice and demonic nondeterminism have been combined in a model for sequential programs in which program refinement is defined by removing demonic nondeterminism. Here we study the more general topic of data refinement in the probabilistic setting, extending standard techniques to probabilistic programs. We use the method to obtain a quantitative assessment of safety of a (probabilistic) version of the steam boiler.

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