Using knowledge to optimally achieve coordination in distributed systems: extended abstract

  • Authors:

  • Gil Neiger;Rida Bazzi

  • Affiliations:

  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia

  • Venue:
  • TARK '92 Proceedings of the 4th conference on Theoretical aspects of reasoning about knowledge
  • Year:
  • 1992

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Abstract

Fundamental to many disciplines is the problem of coordinating the actions of a group of independent agents. Researchers in distributed computing systems have long endeavored to find efficient solutions to a variety of problems involving coordination among the processors in such a system. Recently, processor knowledge has been used to characterize such solution and to derive more efficient ones. Most this work has concentrated on the relationship between common knowledge and simultaneous coordination. This paper takes an alternative approach, considering problems in which coordinated actions need not be performed simultaneously. This approach permits better understanding of the relationship between knowledge and the different requirements of coordination problems. This paper defines the ideas of optimal and optimum solutions to a coordination problem and precisely characterizes the problems for which optimum solutions exist. This characterization is based on combinations of eventual common knowledge and continual common knowledge. The paper then considers more general problems, for which optimal, but no optimum, solutions exist. It defines a new form of knowledge, called extended common knowledge, which combines eventual and continual knowledge, and shows how extended common knowledge can be used to both characterize and construct optimal protocols for coordination.