Towards an epistemic analysis of causality in distributed systems

We propose a new formal knowledge-theoretic framework to model knowledge state of distributed agents in a distributed system. This framework is a generalization of our CTOL approach of modelling a reasoning about knowledge and causality [Moses Y, et al., (1988)]. Within this framework we model communication as a causal dependence between the agents ´actions on impermanent timelines. The agent´s local actions are performed on local timelines, where global timelines are used to capture group knowledge such as common knowledge. This yields a more pragmatic definition to the notion of external knowledge. Moreover, we argue that epistemic causality plays a key role in distributed systems, further we show that causality tracking is much more involved for epistemic causality than for Lamport ´s (1978) potential causality.