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Reasoning about the termination of equational programs in sophisticated equational languages such as ELAN, MAUDE, OBJ, CAFEOBJ, HASKELL, and so on, requires support for advanced features such as evaluation strategies, rewriting modulo, use of extra variables in conditions, partiality, and expressive type systems (possibly including polymorphism and higher-order). However, many of those features are, at best, only partially supported by current term rewriting termination tools (for instance MU-TERM, CiME, APROVE, TTT, TERMPTATION, etc.) while they may be essential to ensure termination. We present a sequence of theory transformations that can be used to bridge the gap between expressive membership equational programs and such termination tools, and prove the correctness of such transformations. We also discuss a prototype tool performing the transformations on MAUDE equational programs and sending the resulting transformed theories to some of the aforementioned standard termination tools.

Termination is one of the most interesting problems when dealing with context-sensitive rewrite systems. Although there is a good number of techniques for proving termination of context-sensitive rewriting (CSR), the dependency pair approach, one of the most powerful techniques for proving termination of rewriting, has not been investigated in connection with proofs of termination of CSR. In this paper, we show how to use dependency pairs in proofs of termination of CSR. The implementation and practical use of the developed techniques yield a novel and powerful framework which improves the current state-of-the-art of methods for proving termination of CSR.

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This paper provides a framework to address termination problems in term rewriting by using orderings induced by algebras over the reals. The generation of such orderings is parameterized by concrete monotonicity requirements which are connected with different classes of termination problems: termination of rewriting, termination of rewriting by using dependency pairs, termination of innermost rewriting, top-termination of infinitary rewriting, termination of context-sensitive rewriting, etc. We show how to define term orderings based on algebraic interpretations over the real numbers which can be used for these purposes. From a practical point of view, we show how to automatically generate polynomial algebras over the reals by using constraint-solving systems to obtain the coefficients of a polynomial in the domain of the real or rational numbers. Moreover, as a consequence of our work, we argue that software systems which are able to generate constraints for obtaining polynomial interpretations over the naturals which prove termination of rewriting (e.g., AProVE, CiME, and TTT), are potentially able to obtain suitable interpretations over the reals by just solving the constraints in the domain of the real or rational numbers.Mathematics Subject Classification. 12Y05.

Polynomial constraint solving plays a prominent role in several areas of hardware and software analysis and verification, e.g., termination proving, program invariant generation and hybrid system verification, to name a few. In this paper we propose a new method for solving non-linear constraints based on encoding the problem into an SMT problem considering only linear arithmetic. Unlike other existing methods, our method focuses on proving satisfiability of the constraints rather than on proving unsatisfiability, which is more relevant in several applications as we illustrate with several examples. Nevertheless, we also present new techniques based on the analysis of unsatisfiable cores that allow one to efficiently prove unsatisfiability too for a broad class of problems. The power of our approach is demonstrated by means of extensive experiments comparing our prototype with state-of-the-art tools on benchmarks taken both from the academic and the industrial world.

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Abstract. Rewriting with rules R modulo axioms E is a widely used technique in both rule-based programming languages and in automated deduction. Termination methods for rewriting systems modulo specific axioms E (e.g., associativity-commutativity) are known. However, much less seems to be known about termination methods that can be modular in the set E of axioms. In fact, current termination tools and proof methods cannot be applied to commonly occurring combinations of axioms that fall outside their scope. This work proposes a modular termination proof method based on semantics-and termination-preserving transformations that can reduce the proof of termination of rules R modulo E to an equivalent proof of termination of the transformed rules modulo a typically much simpler set B of axioms. Our method is based on the notion of variants of a term recently proposed by Comon and Delaune. We illustrate its practical usefulness by considering the very common case in which E is an arbitrary combination of associativity, commutativity, left-and right-identity axioms for various function symbols.