Symbolic Realisation of Epistemic Processes

18 pages•Published: May 26, 2024

Abstract

Epistemic processes describe the dynamic behaviour of multi-agent systems driven by the knowl- edge of agents, which perform epistemic actions that may lead to knowledge updates. Executing epistemic processes directly on epistemic states, given in the traditional way by pointed Kripke structures, quickly becomes computationally expensive due to the semantic update constructions. Based on an abstraction to formulæ of interest, we introduce a symbolic epistemic state representation and a notion of representable epistemic action with efficient symbolic updates. In contrast to existing work on belief or knowledge bases, our approach can handle epistemic actions modelled by arbitrary action models. We introduce an epistemic process calculus and a propositional dynamic logic for specifying process properties that can be interpreted both on the concrete semantic and the symbolic level. We show that our abstraction technique preserves and reflects behavioural properties of epistemic processes whenever processes are started in a symbolic state that is an abstraction of a semantic epistemic state.

Keyphrases: action model, epistemic logic, epistemic process, propositional dynamic logic, symbolic abstraction, symbolic execution, weakest liberal precondition

In: Nikolaj Bjorner, Marijn Heule and Andrei Voronkov (editors). Proceedings of 25th Conference on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning, vol 100, pages 390--407

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/82dt
	https://doi.org/10.29007/h8h3