Size-Change Termination for Term Rewriting

Abstract

In [13], a new size-change principle was proposed to verify termination of functional programs automatically. We extend this principle in order to prove termination and innermost termination of arbitrary term rewrite systems (TRSs). Moreover, we compare this approach with existing techniques for termination analysis of TRSs (such as recursive path orderings or dependency pairs). It turns out that the size-change principle on its own fails for many examples that can be handled by standard techniques for rewriting, but there are also TRSs where it succeeds whereas existing rewriting techniques fail. In order to benefit from their respective advantages, we show how to combine the size-change principle with classical orderings and with dependency pairs. In this way, we obtain a new approach for automated termination proofs of TRSs which is more powerful than previous approaches.