Consistency analysis of decision-making programs

Swarat Chaudhuri, Azadeh Farzan, Zachary Kincaid

Abstract: Applications in many areas of computing make discrete decisions under uncertainty , for reasons such as limited numerical precision in calculations and errors in sensor-derived inputs. As a result, individual decisions made by such programs may be nondeterministic, and lead to contradictory decisions at different points of an execution. This means that an otherwise correct program may execute along paths, that it would not follow under its ideal semantics, violating essential program invariants on the way. A program is said to be consistent if it does not suffer from this problem despite uncertainty in decisions.