Termination Analysis with Compositional Transition Invariants

Abstract. Modern termination provers rely on a safety checker to construct disjunctively well-founded transition invariants. This safety check is known to be the bottleneck of the procedure. We present an alternative algorithm that uses a light-weight check based on transitivity of ranking relations to prove program termination. We provide an experimental evaluation over a set of 87 Windows drivers, and demonstrate that our algorithm is often able to conclude termination by examining only a small fraction of the program. As a consequence, our algorithm is able to outperform known approaches by multiple orders of magnitude.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CAV
• Authors: Daniel Kroening, Natasha Sharygina, Aliaksei Tsitovich, Christoph M. Wintersteiger
• Keywords: Algorithm, CAV 2010, Hardware, Modern Termination Provers, Well-founded Transition Invariants