Ort: Raum S2-02 / A213
Datum und Zeit: Dienstag, 23. Juni 2008, 10:30-11:30 Uhr

Dr. Swarup Mohalik, Senior Researcher, India Science Lab, General Motors, Bangalore, India

Automata for epistemic temporal logic with synchronous communication

We consider systems of finitely many finite state agents who communicate synchronously
with each other. Each agent in the system has a partial knowledge of the temporal evolution
of the system, and every time agents synchronize, they update each other's knowledge,
resulting in a more up-to-date view of the system state. Such distributed causal knowledge
is naturally modelled as a class of epistemic automata, in which agents' local states are
annotated with abstract knowledge assertions about others. We characterize the class
of epistemic recognizable languages as the regular consistent languages studied in
concurrency theory, and prove a Kleene theorem where the syntax employs knowledge
expressions. We use these automata to prove the decidability of a natural epistemic temporal
logic.