A static view of localities

This paper proposes alternative, effective characterizations for nets of automata of the location equivalence and preorder presented by Boudol et al. in the companion paper BCHK]. Contrary to the technical development in the above given reference, where locations are dynamically associated to the subparts of a process in the operational semantics, the equivalence and preorder we propose are based on a static association of locations to the parallel components of a net. Following this static approach, it is possible to give these distributed nets a standard operational semantics which associates with each net a finite labelled transition system. Using this operational semantics for distributed nets, we introduce effective notions of equivalence and preorder which are shown to coincide with those proposed in BCHK].