A Term Rewriting Approach to the Automated Termination Analysis of Imperative Programs

An approach based on term rewriting techniques for the automated termination analysis of imperative programs operating on integers is presented. An imperative program is transformed into rewrite rules with constraints from quantifier-free Presburger arithmetic. Any computation in the imperative program corresponds to a rewrite sequence, and termination of the rewrite system thus implies termination of the imperative program. Termination of the rewrite system is analyzed using a decision procedure for Presburger arithmetic that identifies possible chains of rewrite rules, and automatically generated polynomial interpretations are used to show finiteness of such chains. An implementation of the approach has been evaluated on a large collection of imperative programs, thus demonstrating its effectiveness and practicality.