This paper describes how symbolic techniques (in particular, OBDD's) may be used to to implement an algorithm for model checking specifications in the logic of knowledge for a single agent operating with synchronous perfect recall in an environment of which it has incomplete knowledge. As an illustration of the utility...

Logics of knowledge have been shown to provide a useful approach to the high level specification and analysis of distributed systems. It has been proposed that such systems can be developed using knowledge-based protocols, in which agents' actions have preconditions that test their state of knowledge. Both computer-assisted analysis of the knowledge properties of systems and automated compilation of knowledge-based protocols require the development of algorithms for the computation of states of knowledge. This paper studies one of the computational problems of interest, the model checking problem for knowledge formulae in the S5 n Kripke structures generated by finite state environments in which states determine an observation for each agent. Agents are assumed to have perfect recall, and may operate synchronously or asynchronously. It is shown that, in this setting, model checking of common knowledge formulae is intractable, but efficient incremental algorithms are developed for formu...