A methodology for specifying and verifying distributed systems is presented. The proposed approach, relying on heuristic search techniques for the verification of specifications written in the CRIS language, has been implemented in an automated verification tool prototype. The tool features deal with the acquisition of heuristic information on the specification objects for driving the partial reachability graph generation, and they make it possible to observe the systems internal behavior. First results on the applicability of this approach to a flexible assembly cell are presented and discussed.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>
