Semanticalevaluationsasmonadicsecond-order-LaBRI.docVIP

Graph structure and monadic second-order logic: Language theoretical aspects Bruno Courcelle Université Bordeaux 1, LaBRI, and Institut Universitaire de France Reference : Graph structure and monadic second-order logic, book to be published by Cambridge University Press, readable on : http://www.labri.fr/perso/courcell/ActSci.html History?: Confluence of 4 independent research directions, now intimately related?: Polynomial algorithms for NP-complete and other hard problems on particular classes of graphs, and especially hierarchically structured ones?: series-parallel graphs, cographs, partial k-trees, graphs or hypergraphs of tree-width k, graphs of clique-width k. Excluded minors and related notions of forbidden configurations (matroid minors, ??vertex-minors??). Decidability of Monadic Second-Order logic on classes of finite graphs, and on infinite graphs. Extension to graphs and hypergraphs of the main concepts of Formal Language Theory?: grammars, recognizability, transductions, decidability questions. Two key words : Graph structure (main notions) : hierarchical decompositions (tree-decomposition, modular decomposition,…) embedding on surfaces exclusion of a minor, a vertex-minor or an induced subgraph existence of homomorphism into a fixed graph (generalized coloring) Logic : First-order, second-order, monadic second-order (MS) for expressing graph properties (i.e., defining graph classes) for defining graph transformations, and structures of above types Graph structure and monadic second-order logic are related in many ways MS logic and hierarchical decompositions yield fixed-parameter tractable algorithms (for tree-width and clique-width / rank-width ). Decidability of MS logic implies bounded tree-width or clique-width. Planarity, tree-width k, excluded minors or vertex-minors are MS properties Modular decompositions, planar embeddings can be defined by MS formulas Tree-width bounde