AC-KBO Revisited

Equational theories that contain axioms expressing associativity and commutativity (AC) of certain operators are ubiquitous. Theorem proving methods in such theories rely on well-founded orders that are compatible with the AC axioms. In this paper we consider various definitions of AC-compatible Knuth-Bendix orders. The orders of Steinbach and of Korovin and Voronkov are revisited. The former is enhanced to a more powerful version, and we modify the latter to amend its lack of monotonicity on non-ground terms. We further present new complexity results. An extension reflecting the recent proposal of subterm coefficients in standard Knuth-Bendix orders is also given. The various orders are compared on problems in termination and completion.Comment: 31 pages, To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP) special issue for the 12th International Symposium on Functional and Logic Programming (FLOPS 2014

Decreasing Diagrams and Relative Termination

In this paper we use the decreasing diagrams technique to show that a left-linear term rewrite system R is confluent if all its critical pairs are joinable and the critical pair steps are relatively terminating with respect to R. We further show how to encode the rule-labeling heuristic for decreasing diagrams as a satisfiability problem. Experimental data for both methods are presented.Comment: v3: missing references adde

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

Analyzing program termination and complexity automatically with AProVE

In this system description, we present the tool AProVE for automatic termination and complexity proofs of Java, C, Haskell, Prolog, and rewrite systems. In addition to classical term rewrite systems (TRSs), AProVE also supports rewrite systems containing built-in integers (int-TRSs). To analyze programs in high-level languages, AProVE automatically converts them to (int-)TRSs. Then, a wide range of techniques is employed to prove termination and to infer complexity bounds for the resulting rewrite systems. The generated proofs can be exported to check their correctness using automatic certifiers. To use AProVE in software construction, we present a corresponding plug-in for the popular Eclipse software development environment

Kbo Orientability

This article presents three new approaches to prove termination of rewrite systems with the Knuth-Bendix order efficiently. The constraints for the weight function and for the precedence are encoded in (pseudo-)propositional logic or linear arithmetic and the resulting formula is tested for satisfiability using dedicated solvers. Any satisfying assignment represents a weight function and a precedence such that the induced Knuth-Bendix order orients the rules of the encoded rewrite system from left to right. This means that in contrast to the dedicated methods our approach does not directly solve the problem but transforms it to equivalent formulations for which sophisticated back-ends exist. In order to make all approaches complete we present a method to compute upper bounds on the weights. Furthermore, our encodings take dependency pairs into account to increase the applicability of the order