Detecting Non-Termination of Term Rewriting Systems Using an Unfolding Operator

Etienne Payet (1)

1 IREMIA - Institut de REcherche en Mathématiques et Informatique Appliquées

In this paper, we present an approach to non-termination of term rewriting systems inspired by a technique that was designed in the context of logic programming. Our method is based on a classical unfolding operation together with semi-unification and is independent of a particular reduction strategy. We also describe a technique to reduce the explosion of rules caused by the unfolding process. The analyser that we have implemented is able to solve most of the non-terminating examples in the Termination Problem Data Base.

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Etienne Payet. Detecting Non-Termination of Term Rewriting Systems Using an Unfolding Operator. 16th International Symposium on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR'06), Jul 2006, Venise, Italy. pp.194-209. ⟨hal-01916159⟩