Local reasoning in verification

The goal of this paper is to illustrate the wide applicability in verification of results on local reasoning, and especially on hierarchical reasoning in local theory extensions. The paper contains a survey of our results on reasoning in local theory extensions, ranging from characterizations of locality to interpolation. In addition, several examples are provided, emphasizing theories occurring in a natural way in verification. We give several examples -- some already existing in the literature, others obtained during the work in the AVACS project -- of application domains where such theories occur in a natural way