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Conflict-Driven Conditional Termination

Caterina Urban
Computer Aided Verification, Springer International Publishing (2015), pp. 271-286

Abstract

Conflict-driven learning, which is essential to the performance of sat and smt solvers, consists of a procedure that searches for a model of a formula, and refutation procedure for proving that no model exists. This paper shows that conflict-driven learning can improve the precision of a termination analysis based on abstract interpretation. We encode non-termination as satisfiability in a monadic second-order logic and use abstract interpreters to reason about the satisfiability of this formula. Our search procedure combines decisions with reachability analysis to find potentially non-terminating executions and our refutation procedure uses a conditional termination analysis. Our implementation extends the set of conditional termination arguments discovered by an existing termination analyzer.