Information sharing among ideal agents

Multi-agent systems operating in complex domains crucially require agents to interact with each other. An important result of this interaction is that some of the private knowledge of the agents is being shared in the group of agents. This thesis investigates the theme of knowledge sharing from a theoretical point of view by means of the formal tools provided by modal logic. More specifically this thesis addresses the following three points. First, the case of hypercube systems, a special class of interpreted systems as defined by Halpern and colleagues, is analysed in full detail. It is here proven that the logic S5WDn constitutes a sound and complete axiomatisation for hypercube systems. This logic, an extension of the modal system S5n commonly used to represent knowledge of a multi-agent system, regulates how knowledge is being shared among agents modelled by hypercube systems. The logic S5WDn is proven to be decidable. Hypercube systems are proven to be synchronous agents with perfect recall that communicate only by broadcasting, in separate work jointly with Ron van der Meyden not fully reported in this thesis. Second, it is argued that a full spectrum of degrees of knowledge sharing can be present in any multi-agent system, with no sharing and full sharing at the extremes. This theme is investigated axiomatically and a range of logics representing a particular class of knowledge sharing between two agents is presented. All the logics but two in this spectrum are proven complete by standard canonicity proofs. We conjecture that these two remaining logics are not canonical and it is an open problem whether or not they are complete. Third, following a influential position paper by Halpern and Moses, the idea of refining and checking of knowledge structures in multi-agent systems is investigated. It is shown that, Kripke models, the standard semantic tools for this analysis are not adequate and an alternative notion, Kripke trees, is put forward. An algorithm for refining and checking Kripke trees is presented and its major properties investigated. The algorithm succeeds in solving the famous muddy-children puzzle, in which agents communicate and reason about each other's knowledge. The thesis concludes by discussing the extent to which combining logics, a promising new area in pure logic, can provide a significant boost in research for epistemic and other theories for multi-agent systems

No Finite Model Property for Logics of Quantified Announcements

Quantification over public announcements shifts the perspective from reasoning strictly about the results of a particular announcement to reasoning about the existence of an announcement that achieves some certain epistemic goal. Depending on the type of the quantification, we get differ- ent formalisms, the most known of which are arbitrary public announcement logic (APAL), group announcement logic (GAL), and coalition announcement logic (CAL). It has been an open question whether the logics have the finite model property, and in the paper we answer the question negatively. We also discuss how this result is connected to other open questions in the field.publishedVersio

Zero-one laws with respect to models of provability logic and two Grzegorczyk logics

It has been shown in the late 1960s that each formula of first-order logic without constants and function symbols obeys a zero-one law: As the number of elements of finite models increases, every formula holds either in almost all or in almost no models of that size. Therefore, many properties of models, such as having an even number of elements, cannot be expressed in the language of first-order logic. Halpern and Kapron proved zero-one laws for classes of models corresponding to the modal logics K, T, S4, and S5 and for frames corresponding to S4 and S5. In this paper, we prove zero-one laws for provability logic and its two siblings Grzegorczyk logic and weak Grzegorczyk logic, with respect to model validity. Moreover, we axiomatize validity in almost all relevant finite models, leading to three different axiom systems

Logiques pour les réseaux sociaux : annonces asynchrones dans des structures orthogonales

Cette thèse a deux objets d'étude principaux. D'une part, nous proposons et étudions des modèles de transmission et de réception asynchrones de messages. Pour cela, nous nous plaçons dans le cadre des logiques épistémiques dynamiques - un sous-domaine de la logique modale qui formalise les états épistémiques d'un agent (i.e. ce que l'agent sait) et qui caractérise la façon dont ces états évoluent en différentes circonstances. La plus connue des logiques épistémiques dynamiques est la logique des annonces publiques (Plaza, 1989) - une logique dynamique qui considère comme action de base l'action d'effectuer une annonce publique. Dans un système multi-agent, il est dans la connaissance commune des agents que les messages sont reçus par tous les agents au même instant. Dans le chapitre principal de la thèse, nous proposons un modèle d'annonces asynchrones dans lequel les agents peuvent recevoir les annonces à différents instants tout en ignorant si les autres agents ont également reçu ces annonces. D'autre part, nous étudions une classe de structures relationnelles qui apparaissent assez souvent en logique modale : la classe des cadres orthogonaux. Les cadres orthogonaux sont des structures birelationnelles dans lesquelles deux composantes connexes arbitraires déterminées par les deux relations ont au plus un élément en commun. Pour différentes restrictions de la classe des cadres orthogonaux, nous proposons des axiomatisations correctes et complètes des ensembles de formules valides que ces restrictions déterminent et nous proposons quelques résultats de décidabilité de ces ensembles. Pour illustrer l'ubiquité des cadres orthogonaux, nous proposons des exemples de classes de modèles pour les logiques modales qui sont basées sur eux et nous montrons comment les résultats de la thèse peuvent être utilisés pour étudier ces classes du point de vue de leur orthogonalité. Enfin, nous combinons les deux parties précédentes dans le contexte de la logique épistémique sociale (Seligman et al., 2011). Il s'agit d'une logique développée pour l'étude des états épistémiques des agents dans un réseau social. Nous proposons différentes extensions dynamiques de cette logique et, en particulier, nous modélisons la transmission d'annonces asynchrones dans un réseau social.This thesis has two main objects of study, closely related to each other. On the one hand, we provide and study models for asynchronous transmission and reception of messages. To do this, we utilize the framework of Dynamic Epistemic Logic, a branch of Modal Logic which studies the epistemic state of an agent (i.e. what they know) and how this state changes under several circumstances. One of the better known dynamic epistemic logics is Public Announcement Logic (Plaza, 1989), a logic which allows for a notion of recieving a message. In a multi-agent system, this message is received by all agents at the same time, and they all know that the others have received it. In the main chapter of this thesis, we provide a framework for asynchronous announcements, in which the agents might receive the message at different times and be uncertain whether others know the information contained within it. On the other hand, we study a class of relational structures for modal logics which show up quite often in different areas of the literature: this is the class of orthogonal frames. Orthogonal frames are bi-relational structures wherein two distinct points cannot be connected by both relations at the same time. We give a sound and complete logic of orthogonal frames under different restrictions, and we provide decidability results. To illustrate the ubiquity of these structures, we provide multiple examples of frameworks for modal logics which are based on orthogonal frames, and we use some of the results obtained earlier to show how one can further the study of these structures by focusing on their orthogonality. To finish up, we combine the two areas of study, by taking as a case study the orthogonal framework of Social Epistemic Logic (Seligman et al., 2011). This is a framework for studying the epistemic state of agents in a social network. We provide different dynamic extensions, and in particular we give a way to model the transmission of announcements asynchronously in a social networ