A priori Belief Updates as a Method for Agent Self-recovery

Abstract

Standard epistemic logic is concerned with describing agents’ epistemic attitudes given the current set of alternatives the agents consider possible. While distributed systems can be (and often are) discussed without mentioning epistemics, it has been well established that epistemic phenomena lie at the heart of what agents, or processes, can and cannot do. Dynamic epistemic logic (DEL) aims to describe how epistemic attitudes of the agents/processes change based on the new information they receive, e.g., based on their observations of events and actions in a distributed system. In a broader philosophical view, this appeals to an a posteriori kind of reasoning, where agents update the set of alternatives considered possible based on their “experiences.” Until recently, there was little incentive to formalize a priori reasoning, which plays a role in designing and maintaining distributed systems, e.g., in determining which states must be considered possible by agents in order to solve the distributed task at hand, and consequently in updating these states when unforeseen situations arise during runtime. With systems becoming more and more complex and large, the task of fixing design errors “on the fly” is shifted to individual agents, such as in the increasingly popular self-adaptive and self-organizing (SASO) systems. Rather than updating agents’ a posteriori beliefs, this requires modifying their a priori beliefs about the system’s global design and parameters. The goal of this paper is to provide a formalization of such a priori reasoning by using standard epistemic semantic tools, including Kripke models and DEL-style updates, and provide heuristics that would pave the way to streamlining this inherently nondeterministic and ad hoc process for SASO systems.