Abstract
Knowledge-based programs have been proposed as an abstract formalism for the design of distributed systems, based on the idea that an agent's actions are a function of its state of knowledge. We identify two natural cases in which finite state implementations of atemporal knowledge-based programs in finite environments may be automatically constructed. The first concerns an interpretation of knowledge in which agents are aware only of their current observation and the current time. The second concerns the perfect recall interpretation of knowledge, in environments in which all communication is by synchronous broadcast. These results contribute towards a theory of automated synthesis of protocols from knowledge-based specifications.
Work begun while the author was with the Information Sciences Laboratory, NTT Basic Research Laboratories, Kanagawa, Japan, and continued at the Department of Applied Math and Computer Science, Weizmann Institute of Science. Thanks to Yoram Moses and Moshe Vardi for helpful discussions.
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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van der Meyden, R. (1996). Finite state implementations of knowledge-based programs. In: Chandru, V., Vinay, V. (eds) Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science. FSTTCS 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1180. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62034-6_55
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62034-6_55
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