Subjective Knowledge and Reasoning about Agents in Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract: Though a lot of work in multi-agent systems is focused on reasoning about knowledge and beliefs of artificial agents, an explicit representation and reasoning about the presence/absence of agents, especially in the scenarios where agents may be unaware of other agents joining in or going offline in a multi-agent system, leading to partial knowledge/asymmetric knowledge of the agents is mostly overlooked by the MAS community. Such scenarios lay the foundations of cases where an agent can influence other agents' mental states by (mis)informing them about the presence/absence of collaborators or adversaries. In this paper, we investigate how Kripke structure-based epistemic models can be extended to express the above notion based on an agent's subjective knowledge and we discuss the challenges that come along.