Conformance of distributed systems

This paper introduces a new conformance relation-between a specification and an implementation of a distributed system. It is based on a local view which allows to avoid or reduce the state explosion problem. The conformance relation is defined via Petri nets and shows not only equivalence between transitions but also equivalence between local states. This equivalence depends on the structural properties of the Petri net and is independent of any specific initial marking. We compare our notion of conformance to classical ones and give model checking and test case generation algorithms for it.