Reversible computation in term rewriting

In this work, we focus on term rewriting, a computation model that underlies most rule-based programming languages. In general, term rewriting is not reversible, even for injective functions; namely, given a rewrite step t1→t2, we do not always have a decidable method to get t1 from t2. Here, we introduce a conservative extension of term rewriting that becomes reversible. Furthermore, we also define two transformations, injectivization and inversion, to make a rewrite system reversible using standard term rewriting. We illustrate the usefulness of our transformations in the context of bidirectional program transformation.