Termination of Monotone Programs

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient static analysis method to prove termination of monotone integer programs, leveraging properties of monotone functions, and demonstrates its effectiveness over existing tools on benchmark loops.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel lightweight static analysis approach specifically for proving termination of monotone programs with integer variables.

Findings

Outperforms existing tools on benchmark loops

Proves termination for a high percentage of monotone loops

Utilizes properties of monotone functions for analysis

Abstract

We present an efficient approach to prove termination of monotone programs with integer variables, an expressive class of loops that is often encountered in computer programs. Our approach is based on a lightweight static analysis method and takes advantage of simple %nice properties of monotone functions. Our preliminary implementation %beats shows that our tool has an advantage over existing tools and can prove termination for a high percentage of loops for a class of benchmarks.