Besides the very successful concept of tree-width (see [Bodlaender, H. and Koster, A. (2007) Combinatorial optimisation on graphs of bounded treewidth. These are special issues on Parameterized Complexity]), many concepts and parameters measuring the similarity or dissimilarity of structures compared to trees have been born and studied over the past years. These concepts and parameters have proved to be useful tools in many applications, especially in the design of efficient algorithms. Our presented novel look at the contemporary developments of these ‘width ’ parameters in combinatorial structures delivers—besides traditional tree-width and derived dynamic programming schemes—also a number of other useful parameters like branch-width, rank-width (clique-width) or hypertree-width. In this contribution, we demonstrate how ‘width ’ parameters of graphs and generalized structures (such as matroids or hypergraphs), can be used to improve the design of parameterized algorithms and the structural analysis in other applications on an abstract level.

We consider the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) parameterized by the treewidth of primal, dual, and incidence graphs, combined with several other basic parameters such as domain size and arity. We determine all combinations of the considered parameters that admit fixed-parameter tractability. Key words: Constraint satisfaction, parameterized complexity, treewidth 1

We study the notion of hypertree width of hypergraphs. We prove that, up to a constant factor, hypertree width is the same as a number of other hypergraph invariants that resemble graph invariants such as bramble number, branch width, linkedness, and the minimum number of cops required to win Seymour and Thomas’s robber and cops game. 1

Abstract not found

The notions of hypertree width and generalized hypertree width were introduced by Gottlob, Leone, and Scarcello in order to extend the concept of hypergraph acyclicity. These notions were further generalized by Grohe and Marx who introduced the fractional hypertree width of a hypergraph. All these width parameters on hypergraphs are useful for extending tractability of many problems in database theory and artificial intelligence. In this paper, we study the approximability of (generalized, fractional) hyper treewidth of sparse hypergraphs where the criterion of sparsity reflects the sparsity of their incidence graphs. Our first step is to prove that the (generalized, fractional) hypertree width of a hypergraph H is constant-factor sandwiched by the treewidth of its incidence graph, when the incidence graph belongs to some apex-minor-free graph class (the family of apex-minor-free graph classes includes planar graphs and graphs of bounded genus). This determines the combinatorial borderline above which the notion of (generalized, fractional) hypertree width becomes essentially more general than treewidth, justifying that way its functionality as a hypergraph acyclicity measure. While for more general sparse families of hypergraphs treewidth of incidence graphs and all hypertree width parameters may differ arbitrarily, there are sparse families where a constant factor approximation algorithm is possible. In particular, we give a constant factor approximation polynomial time algorithm for (generalized, fractional) hypertree width on hypergraphs whose incidence graphs belong to some H-minor-free graph class.

In this thesis, we analyze the problem of computing pure Nash equilibria in succinctly representable games, with a focus on graphical and action-graph games. While the problem is NP-Complete for both models, it is known to be polynomial time computable when restricted to games of bounded treewidth. We propose a dynamic programming approach for computing pure Nash equilibria of graphical games. Our algorithm attacks the combinatorics of the problem directly, in contrast to previous algorithms that use mappings to other problems. The analysis yields substantial improvements over the known bounds on the time complexity of the problem. From the viewpoint of parameterized complexity, we prove that computing pure Nash equilibria for graphical games is W [1]-Hard when parameterized by treewidth. On the other hand, our algorithm becomes Fixed-Parameter-Tractable for games with bounded cardinality strategy sets. Moreover, we discuss the implication of our algorithm for solving games with O(log n) bounded treewidth. Finally, it is possible to construct a sample, and the maximum payoff, pure Nash equilibrium without additional computational effort.