Analysing Graph Transformation Systems using Extended Methods from Constraint Handling Rules

Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) [1] has become a general-purpose rule-based programming language throughout the last decade. The relations to many other formalisms have been investigated [2] and often results could be transferred from CHR to other formalisms, or vice versa. Graph Transformation Systems (GTS) [3], which have been developed in the 60ies and have become increasingly popular, have not been compared to CHR before. GTS and CHR appear to be very similar on a cursory glance, as they are both non-deterministic rule-based state transition systems. However, the fact that confluence is decidable in CHR [1] and undecidable in GTS [4] warrants a closer investigation of the two formalisms. Hence, I want to apply analysis methods of CHR to GTS, concentrating on confluence analysis.