Abstract

Modular properties of term rewriting systems, i.e. properties which are preserved under disjoint unions, have attracted an increasing attention within the last few years. Whereas confluence is modular this does not hold true in general for termination. By result. Whenever the disjoint union R 1 \Phi R 2 of two (finite) terminating term rewriting systems R 1, R 2 is non-terminating, then one of the systems, say R 1, enjoys an interesting (undecidable) property, namely it is not termination preserving under non-deterministic collapses, i.e. R 1 \Phi fG(x; y) ! x; G(x; y) ! yg is non-terminating, and the other system R 2 is collapsing, i.e. contains a rule with a variable right hand side. This result generalizes known sufficient syntactical criteria for modular termination of rewriting. Then we develop a specialized version of the `increasing interpretation method' for proving termination of combinations of term rewriting systems. This method is applied to establish modularity of termination for certain classes of term rewriting systems. In particular, termination turns out to be modular for the class of

Citations