Termination Analysis of Logic Programs Based on Dependency Graphs

This paper introduces a modular framework for termination analysis of logic programming. To this end, we adapt the notions of dependency pairs and dependency graphs (which were developed for term rewriting) to the logic programming domain. The main idea of the approach is that termination conditions for a program are established based on the decomposition of its dependency graph into its strongly connected components. These conditions can then be analysed separately by possibly different well-founded orders. We propose a constraint-based approach for automating the framework. Then, for example, termination techniques based on polynomial interpretations can be plugged in as a component to generate well-founded orders.