Symbolic Synthesis for Epistemic Specifications with Observational Semantics

The paper describes a framework for the synthesis of protocols for distributed and multi-agent systems from specifications that give a program structure that may include variables in place of conditional expressions, together with specifications in a temporal epistemic logic that constrain the values of these variables. The epistemic operators are interpreted with respect to an observational semantics. The framework generalizes the notion of knowledge-based program proposed by Fagin et al (Dist. Comp. 1997). An algorithmic approach to the synthesis problem is developed that computes all solutions, using a reduction to epistemic model checking, that has been implemented using symbolic techniques. An application of the approach to synthesize mutual exclusion protocols is presented.