College of Computing Sciences

Analyzing System Redundancy

Whereas redundancy is usually thought of as referring to duplication of functions, data, or parts of data, we argue that it can in fact be equated with various set theoretic/ function theoretic properties of program states and program functions.  In this project, we explore quantitative and qualitative models of redundancy:

• Quantitative Models.  We explore formulas that compute the redundancy of a function and the redundancy of a state representation, and show that our formulas capture our intuition about these quantities.

• Qualitative Models.   We show that redundancy can be equated with functional properties of state representations and program functions, such as the non-injectivity of some program functions, the non-surjectivity of some program functions, and the non-determinacy of some program specifications.  We also show that the traditional view of redundancy (as duplication of state information of program functions) is a special case of these general characterizations.

A synopsis of the status of our research can be found in this paper.