Termination of Just/Fair Computations in Term Rewriting

The main goal of this paper is to apply rewriting termination technology .enjoying a quite mature set of termination results and tools. to the problem of proving automatically the termination of concurrent systems under fairness assumptions. We adopt the thesis that a concurrent system can be naturally modeled as a rewrite system, and develop a reductionistic theoretical approach to systematically transform, under reasonable assumptions, fair-termination problems into ordinary termination problems of associated relations, to which standard rewriting termination techniques and tools can be applied. Our theoretical results are combined into a practical proof methodology for proving fair-termination that can be automated and can be supported by current termination tools. We illustrate this methodology with some concrete examples and briefly comment on future extensions