Effectively Checking the Finite Variant Property

An equational theory decomposed into a set B of equational axioms and a set Δ of rewrite rules has the finite variant (FV) property in the sense of Comon-Lundh and Delaune iff for each term t there is a finite set {t1, . . . , tn} of →Δ,B-normalized instances of t so that any instance of t normalizes to an instance of some ti modulo B. This is a very useful property for cryptographic protocol analysis, and for solving both unification and disunification problems. Yet, at present the property has to be established by hand, giving a separate mathematical proof for each given theory: no checking algorithms seem to be known. In this paper we give both a necessary and a sufficient condition for FV from which we derive an algorithm ensuring the sufficient condition, and thus FV. This algorithm can check automatically a number of examples of FV known in the literature.