Ronald Fagin, Benny Kimelfeld, et al.
ACM TODS
We present a formal model that captures the subtle interaction between knowledge and action in distributed systems. We view a distributed system as a set of runs, where a run is a function from time to global states and a global state is a tuple consisting of an environment state and a local state for earch process in the system. This model is a generalization of those used in many previous papers. Actions in this model are associated with functions from global states to global states. A protocol is a function from local states to actions. We extend the standard notion of a protocol by defining knowledge-based protocols, ones in which a process' actions may depend explicitly on its knowledge. Knowledge-based protocols provide a natural way of describing how actions should take place in a distributed system. Finally, we show how the notion of one protocol implementing another can be captured in our model. © 1989 Springer-Verlag.
Ronald Fagin, Benny Kimelfeld, et al.
ACM TODS
Joseph Y. Halpern
Journal of Logic and Computation
Ronald Fagin, Edward L. Wimmers
Theoretical Computer Science
Ronald Fagin
SIGMOD/PODS/ 2006