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

We 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.