Traditionally, computational complexity has considered only static problems. Classical Complexity Classes such as NC, P, and NP are defined in terms of the complexity of checking -- upon presentation of an entire input -- whether the input satisfies a certain property. For many applications of computers it is more appropriate to model the process as a dynamic one. There is a fairly large object being worked on over a period of time. The object is repeatedly modified by users and computations are performed. We develop a theory of Dynamic Complexity. We study the new complexity class, Dynamic First-Order Logic (Dyn-FO). This is the set of properties that can be maintained and queried in first-order logic, i.e. relational calculus, on a relational database. We show that many interesting properties are in Dyn-FO including multiplication, graph connectivity, bipartiteness, and the computation of minimum spanning trees. Note that none of these problems is in static FO, and this f...

We prove lower bounds on the complexity of maintaining fully dynamic k-edge or k-vertex connectivity in plane graphs and in (k − 1)-vertex connected graphs. We show an amortized lower bound of �(log n/k(log log n + log b)) per edge insertion, deletion, or query operation in the cell probe model, where b is the word size of the machine and n is the number of vertices in G. We also show an amortized lower bound of �(log n/(log log n + log b)) per operation for fully dynamic planarity testing in embedded graphs. These are the first lower bounds for fully dynamic connectivity problems.