Logics of knowledge and action: critical analysis and challenges

International audienceWe overview the most prominent logics of knowledge and action that were proposed and studied in the multiagent systems literature. We classify them according to these two dimensions, knowledge and action, and moreover introduce a distinction between individual knowledge and group knowledge, and between a nonstrategic an a strategic interpretation of action operators. For each of the logics in our classification we highlight problematic properties. They indicate weaknesses in the design of these logics and call into question their suitability to represent knowledge and reason about it. This leads to a list of research challenges

The Internet-of-Things Meets Business Process Management: Mutual Benefits and Challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected devices collecting and exchanging data over the Internet. These things can be artificial or natural, and interact as autonomous agents forming a complex system. In turn, Business Process Management (BPM) was established to analyze, discover, design, implement, execute, monitor and evolve collaborative business processes within and across organizations. While the IoT and BPM have been regarded as separate topics in research and practice, we strongly believe that the management of IoT applications will strongly benefit from BPM concepts, methods and technologies on the one hand; on the other one, the IoT poses challenges that will require enhancements and extensions of the current state-of-the-art in the BPM field. In this paper, we question to what extent these two paradigms can be combined and we discuss the emerging challenges

A simple logic for reasoning about incomplete knowledge

International audienceThe semantics of modal logics for reasoning about belief or knowledge is often described in terms of accessibility relations, which is too expressive to account for mere epistemic states of an agent. This paper proposes a simple logic whose atoms express epistemic attitudes about formulae expressed in another basic propositional language, and that allows for conjunctions, disjunctions and negations of belief or knowledge statements. It allows an agent to reason about what is known about the beliefs held by another agent. This simple epistemic logic borrows its syntax and axioms from the modal logic KD. It uses only a fragment of the S5 language, which makes it a two-tiered propositional logic rather than as an extension thereof. Its semantics is given in terms of epistemic states understood as subsets of mutually exclusive propositional interpretations. Our approach offers a logical grounding to uncertainty theories like possibility theory and belief functions. In fact, we define the most basic logic for possibility theory as shown by a completeness proof that does not rely on accessibility relations

Quantified epistemic logics for reasoning about knowledge in multi-agent systems

AbstractWe introduce quantified interpreted systems, a semantics to reason about knowledge in multi-agent systems in a first-order setting. Quantified interpreted systems may be used to interpret a variety of first-order modal epistemic languages with global and local terms, quantifiers, and individual and distributed knowledge operators for the agents in the system. We define first-order modal axiomatisations for different settings, and show that they are sound and complete with respect to the corresponding semantical classes.The expressibility potential of the formalism is explored by analysing two MAS scenarios: an infinite version of the muddy children problem, a typical epistemic puzzle, and a version of the battlefield game. Furthermore, we apply the theoretical results here presented to the analysis of message passing systems [R. Fagin, J. Halpern, Y. Moses, M. Vardi, Reasoning about Knowledge, MIT Press, 1995; L. Lamport, Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system, Communication of the ACM 21 (7) (1978) 558–565], and compare the results obtained to their propositional counterparts. By doing so we find that key known meta-theorems of the propositional case can be expressed as validities on the corresponding class of quantified interpreted systems

PDL as a Multi-Agent Strategy Logic

Propositional Dynamic Logic or PDL was invented as a logic for reasoning about regular programming constructs. We propose a new perspective on PDL as a multi-agent strategic logic (MASL). This logic for strategic reasoning has group strategies as first class citizens, and brings game logic closer to standard modal logic. We demonstrate that MASL can express key notions of game theory, social choice theory and voting theory in a natural way, we give a sound and complete proof system for MASL, and we show that MASL encodes coalition logic. Next, we extend the language to epistemic multi-agent strategic logic (EMASL), we give examples of what it can express, we propose to use it for posing new questions in epistemic social choice theory, and we give a calculus for reasoning about a natural class of epistemic game models. We end by listing avenues for future research and by tracing connections to a number of other logics for reasoning about strategies.Comment: 10 pages, Poster presentation at TARK 2013 (arXiv:1310.6382) http://www.tark.or