On Local Reasoning in Verification

We present a general framework which allows to identify complex theories important in verification for which efficient reasoning methods exist. The framework we present is based on a general notion of locality. We show that locality considerations allow us to obtain parameterized decidability and complexity results for many (combinations of) theories important in verification in general and in the verification of parametric systems in particular. We give numerous examples; in particular we show that several theories of data structures studied in the verification literature are local extensions of a base theory. The general framework we use allows us to identify situations in which some of the syntactical restrictions imposed in previous papers can be relaxed.

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