  Hierarchical transition systems provide a popular mathematical structure to
represent state-based software applications in which different layers of
abstraction are represented by inter-related state machines. The decomposition
of high level states into inner sub-states, and of their transitions into inner
sub-transitions is common refinement procedure adopted in a number of
specification formalisms.
  This paper introduces a hybrid modal logic for k-layered transition systems,
its first-order standard translation, a notion of bisimulation, and a modal
invariance result. Layered and hierarchical notions of refinement are also
discussed in this setting.
