Abstract
We define a process calculus to describe multi-agent systems with timeouts for communication and mobility able to handle knowledge. The knowledge of an agent is represented as sets of trees whose nodes carry information; it is used to decide the interactions with other agents. The evolution of the system with exchanges of knowledge between agents is presented by the operational semantics, capturing the concurrent executions by a multiset of actions in a labelled transition system. Several results concerning the relationship between the agents and their knowledge are presented. We introduce and study some specific behavioural equivalences in multi-agent systems, including a knowledge equivalence able to distinguish two systems based on the interaction of the agents with their local knowledge.
Highlights
Knowledge Dynamics and Process calculi are used to describe concurrent systems, providing a high-level description of interactions, communications and synchronizations between independent processes or agents
The main features of a process calculus are: (i) interactions between agents/processes are by communication, rather than modifying shared variables; (ii) large systems are described in a compositional way by using a small number of primitives and operators; (iii) processes can be manipulated by using equational reasoning and behavioural equivalences
The compositionality offered by the parallel composition can help to describe large systems in a modular way, and to better organize their knowledge
Summary
Knowledge Dynamics and Process calculi are used to describe concurrent systems, providing a high-level description of interactions, communications and synchronizations between independent processes or agents. In this paper we define an extension of the process calculus T I M O [1] in order to model multi-agent systems and their knowledge. In this framework, the agents can move between locations and exchange information, having explicit timeouts for both migration and communication. There exist efficient algorithms for bisimilarity checking and compositionality properties of bisimilarity, algorithms that are usually used to minimize the state-space of systems These are good reasons why we consider that it is important to define and study some specific behavioural equivalences for multi-agent systems enhanced with a knowledge of the network for deciding the interactions.
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