Simplicial Models for the Epistemic Logic of Faulty Agents

In recent years, several authors have been investigating simplicial models, a model of epistemic logic based on higher-dimensional structures called simplicial complexes. In the original formulation, simplicial models were always assumed to be pure, meaning that all worlds have the same dimension. This is equivalent to the standard S5n semantics of epistemic logic, based on Kripke models. By removing the assumption that models must be pure, we can go beyond the usual Kripke semantics and study epistemic logics where the number of agents participating in a world can vary. This approach has been developed in a number of papers, with applications in fault-tolerant distributed computing where processes may crash during the execution of a system. A difficulty that arises is that subtle design choices in the definition of impure simplicial models can result in different axioms of the resulting logic. In this paper, we classify those design choices systematically, and axiomatize the corresponding logics. We illustrate them via distributed computing examples of synchronous systems where processes may crash.

A Simplicial Model for $KB4_n$: Epistemic Logic with Agents that May Die

The standard semantics of multi-agent epistemic logic $S5$ is based on Kripke models whose accessibility relations are reflexive, symmetric and transitive. This one dimensional structure contains implicit higher-dimensional information beyond pairwise interactions, that has been formalized as pure simplicial models in previous work from the authors. Here we extend the theory to encompass all simplicial models - including the ones that are not pure. The corresponding Kripke models are those where the accessibility relation is symmetric and transitive, but might not be reflexive. This yields the epistemic logic $KB4$ which can reason about situations where some of the agents may die.