S.: Locality-based abstractions

Abstract. We present locality-based abstractions, in which a set of states of a distributed system is abstracted to the collection of views that some observers have of the states. Special cases of locality-abstractions have been used in different contexts (planning, analysis of concurrent programs, concurrency theory). In this paper we give a general definition in the context of abstract interpretation, show that arbitrary locality-based abstractions are hard to compute in general, and provide two solutions to this problem. The solutions are evaluated in several case studies.