Termination of Fair Computations in Term Rewriting

Abstract. The main goal of this paper is to apply rewriting termination technology —enjoying a quite mature set of termination results and tools— to the problem of proving automatically the termination of concurrent systems under fairness assumptions. We adopt the thesis that a concurrent system can be naturally modeled as a rewrite system, and develop a reductionistic theoretical approach to systematically transform, under reasonable assumptions, fair-termination problems into ordinary termination problems of associated relations, to which standard rewriting termination techniques and tools can be applied. Our theoretical results are combined into a practical proof methodology for proving fairtermination that can be automated and can be supported by current termination tools. We illustrate this methodology with some concrete examples and briefly comment on future extensions.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: LPAR
• Authors: Salvador Lucas, José Meseguer
• Keywords: LPAR 2005, Ordinary Termination Problems, Rewriting Termination, Standard Rewriting Termination