Decision Procedures for Automating Termination Proofs

Automated termination provers often use the following schema to prove that a program terminates: construct a relational abstraction of the program’s transition relation and then show that the relational abstraction is wellfounded. The focus of current tools has been on developing sophisticated techniques for constructing the abstractions while relying on known decidable logics (such as linear arithmetic) to express them. We believe we can significantly increase the class of programs that are amenable to automated termination proofs by identifying more expressive decidable logics for reasoning about well-founded relations. We therefore present a new decision procedure for reasoning about multiset orderings, which are among the most powerful orderings used to prove termination. We show that, using our decision procedure, one can automatically prove termination of natural abstractions of programs.