Title
Logic program termination analysis using atom sizes
Abstract
Recent years have witnessed a great deal of interest in extending answer set programming with function symbols. Since the evaluation of a program with function symbols might not terminate and checking termination is undecidable, several classes of logic programs have been proposed where the use of function symbols is limited but the program evaluation is guaranteed to terminate. In this paper, we propose a novel class of logic programs whose evaluation always terminates. The proposed technique identifies terminating programs that are not captured by any of the current approaches. Our technique is based on the idea of measuring the size of terms and atoms to check whether the rule head size is bounded by the body, and performs a more fine-grained analysis than previous work. Rather than adopting an all-ornothing approach (either we can say that the program is terminating or we cannot say anything), our technique can identify arguments that are \"limited\" (i.e., where there is no infinite propagation of terms) even when the program is not entirely recognized as terminating. Identifying arguments that are limited can support the user in the problem formulation and help other techniques that use limited arguments as a starting point. Another useful feature of our approach is that it is able to leverage external information about limited arguments. We also provide results on the correctness, the complexity, and the expressivity of our technique.
Year
Venue
Field
2015
IJCAI
Logic program,Computer science,Correctness,Theoretical computer science,Termination analysis,Normalization property,Answer set programming,Undecidable problem,Program evaluation,Bounded function
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
1
0.34
References 
Authors
24
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marco Calautti1175.28
Sergio Greco21249265.35
Cristian Molinaro312628.71
Irina Trubitsyna411924.66