  Halpern and Moses were the first to recognize, in 1984, the importance of a
formal treatment of knowledge in distributed computing. Many works in
distributed computing, however, still employ informal notions of knowledge.
Hence, it is critical to further study such formalizations. Action models, a
significant approach to modeling dynamic epistemic logic, have only recently
been applied to distributed computing, for instance, by Goubault, Ledent, and
Rajsbaum. Using action models for analyzing distributed-computing environments,
as proposed by these authors, has drawbacks, however. In particular, a direct
use of action models may cause such models to grow exponentially as the
computation of the distributed system evolves. Hence, our motivation is finding
compact action models for distributed systems. We introduce communication
pattern models as an extension of both ordinary action models and their update
operator. We give a systematic construction of communication pattern models for
a large variety of distributed-computing models called dynamic-network models.
For a proper subclass of dynamic-network models called oblivious, the
communication pattern model remains the same throughout the computation.
