Feasible Trace Reconstruction for Rewriting Approximations

International audienceTerm Rewriting Systems are now commonly used as a modeling language for programs or systems. On those rewriting based models, reachability analysis, i.e. proving or disproving that a given term is reachable from a set of input terms, provides an efficient verification technique. For disproving reachability (i.e. proving non reachability of a term) on non terminating and non confluent rewriting models, Knuth- Bendix completion and other usual rewriting techniques do not apply. Using the tree automaton completion technique, it has been shown that the non reachability of a term t can be shown by computing an overapproximation of the set of reachable terms and prove that t is not in the approximation. However, when the term t is in the approximation, nothing can be said. In this paper, we refine this approach and propose a method taking advantage of the approximation to compute a rewriting path to the reachable term when it exists, i.e. produce a counter example. The algorithm has been prototyped in the Timbuk tool. We present some experiments with this prototype showing the interest of such an approach w.r.t. verification of rewriting models