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Termination of constructor systems

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Rewriting Techniques and Applications (RTA 1996)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1103))

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Abstract

We present a method to prove termination of constructor systems automatically. Our approach takes advantage of the special form of these rewrite systems because for constructor systems instead of left- and right-hand sides of rules it is sufficient to compare so-called dependency pairs [Art96]. Unfortunately, standard techniques for the generation of well-founded orderings cannot be directly used for the automation of the dependency pair approach. To solve this problem we have developed a transformation technique which enables the application of known synthesis methods for well-founded orderings to prove that dependency pairs are decreasing. In this way termination of many (also non-simply terminating) constructor systems can be proved fully automatically.

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under grant no. Wa 652/7-1 as part of the focus program “Deduktion”.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508, TB Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Thomas Arts

  2. FB Informatik, TH Darmstadt, Alexanderstr. 10, 64283, Darmstadt, Germany

    Jürgen Giesl

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  1. Thomas Arts
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  2. Jürgen Giesl
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Harald Ganzinger

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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Arts, T., Giesl, J. (1996). Termination of constructor systems. In: Ganzinger, H. (eds) Rewriting Techniques and Applications. RTA 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1103. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61464-8_43

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61464-8_43

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61464-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68596-8

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