Epistemic Ensembles

• Published in: Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Adaptation and Learning Vol. 13703; pp. 110 - 126
• Main Authors: Hennicker, Rolf, Knapp, Alexander, Wirsing, Martin
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer 2022; Springer Nature Switzerland
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• ISBN: 3031197585; 9783031197581
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-19759-8_8

An ensemble consists of a set of computing entities which collaborate to reach common goals. We introduce epistemic ensembles that use shared knowledge for collaboration between agents. Collaboration is achieved by different kinds of knowledge announcements. For specifying epistemic ensemble behaviours we use formulas of dynamic logic with compound ensemble actions. Our semantics relies on an epistemic notion of ensemble transition systems as behavioural models. These transition systems describe control flow over epistemic states for expressing knowledge-based collaboration of agents. Specifications are implemented by epistemic processes that are composed in parallel to form ensemble realisations. We give a formal operational semantics of these processes that generates an epistemic ensemble transition system. A realisation is correct w. r. t. an ensemble specification if its semantics is a model of the specification.