Common knowledge and multi-scale locality analysis in Cayley structures

Abstract

We investigate multi-agent epistemic modal logic with common knowledge modalities for groups of agents and obtain van Benthem style model-theoretic characterisations, in terms of bisimulation invariance of classical first-order logic over the non-elementary classes of (finite or arbitrary) common knowledge Kripke frames. The fixpoint character of common knowledge modalities and the rôle that reachability and transitive closures play for the derived accessibility relations take our analysis beyond classical model-theoretic terrain and technically pose a novel challenge to the analysis of model-theoretic games. Over and above the more familiar locality-based techniques we exploit a specific structure theory for specially adapted Cayley groups: through the association of agents with sets of generators, all epistemic frames can be represented up to bisimilarity by suitable Cayley groups with specific acyclicity properties; these support a locality analysis at different levels of granularity as induced by distance measures w.r.t. various coalitions of agents.