Formalizing Knuth-Bendix Orders and Knuth-Bendix Completion

We present extensions of our Isabelle Formalization of Rewriting that cover two historically related concepts: the Knuth-Bendix order and the Knuth-Bendix completion procedure. The former, besides being the first development of its kind in a proof assistant, is based on a generalized version of the Knuth-Bendix order. We compare our version to variants from the literature and show all properties required to certify termination proofs of TRSs. The latter comprises the formalization of important facts that are related to completion, like Birkhoff\u27s theorem, the critical pair theorem, and a soundness proof of completion, showing that the strict encompassment condition is superfluous for finite runs. As a result, we are able to certify completion proofs

The Certification Problem Format

We provide an overview of CPF, the certification problem format, and explain some design decisions. Whereas CPF was originally invented to combine three different formats for termination proofs into a single one, in the meanwhile proofs for several other properties of term rewrite systems are also expressible: like confluence, complexity, and completion. As a consequence, the format is already supported by several tools and certifiers. Its acceptance is also demonstrated in international competitions: the certified tracks of both the termination and the confluence competition utilized CPF as exchange format between automated tools and trusted certifiers.Comment: In Proceedings UITP 2014, arXiv:1410.785