Abstract. Given an alphabet Σ, a (directed) graph G whose edges are weighted and Σ-labeled, and a formal language L ⊆ Σ ∗ , the formal-language-constrained shortest/simple path problem consists of finding a shortest (simple) path p in G complying with the additional constraint that l(p) ∈ L. Here l(p) denotes the unique word obtained by concatenating the Σ-labels of the edges along the path p. The main contributions of this paper include the following: (1) We show that the formal-language-constrained shortest path problem is solvable efficiently in polynomial time when L is restricted to be a context-free language (CFL). When L is specified as a regular language we provide algorithms with improved space and time bounds. (2) In contrast, we show that the problem of finding a simple path between a source and a given destination is NP-hard, even when L is restricted to fixed simple regular languages and to very simple classes of graphs (e.g., complete grids). (3) For the class of treewidth-bounded graphs, we show that (i) the problem of finding a regular-language-constrained simple path between source and destination is solvable in polynomial time and (ii) the extension to finding CFL-constrained simple paths is NP-complete.

Optimizing Incremental View Maintenance Expressions in Relational Databases Dimitra Vista Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 1996 In the last few years, there has been significant interest in the design of incremental methods to improve the performance of view maintenance. Despite that, very little analysis or experimentation supports the predominant view that incremental methods are more efficient than their non-incremental counterparts. We argue that the performance of incremental view maintenance depends on system aspects of the database, such as the availability of indices, the sizes of the relations involved, and the sizes of the database updates. We also argue that the database query optimizer is a reasonable component of the database system to decide, at the time of view maintenance, whether a view is to be maintained incrementally or not, because the query optimizer has knowledge of, and access to, all of the parameters that...

Given a database, the view maintenance problem is concerned with the efficient computation of the new contents of a given view when updates to the database happen. We consider the view maintenance problem for the situation when the database contains a (weighted) graph and the view is either the transitive closure or the answer to the all-pairs shortest-distance problem (APSD). We give incremental algorithms for (APSD), which support both edge insertions and deletions. For transitive closure, the algorithm is applicable to a more general class of graphs than those previously explored. Our algorithms use first-order queries, along with addition (+) and less-than (<) operations (F O(+, <)); they store O(n 2) number of tuples, where n is the number of vertices, and have AC 0 data complexity for integer weights. Since F O(+, <) is a sublanguage of SQL and is supported by almost all current database systems, our maintenance algorithms are more appropriate for database applications than non-database query type of maintenance algorithms.

We present a general technique for dynamizing a class of problems whose underlying structure is a computation graph embedded in a tree. We associate values, called attributes, with the nodes, paths, and subtrees of our trees. Path attributes form a path attribute system, if they are maintained in constant time under path concatenation. Additionally, attributes form a tree attribute system if the tree attributes of the tail of a path \Pi are determined in constant time from the path attributes of \Pi. We also introduce a new data structure called a linear attribute grammar. An attribute grammar is a tree-based expression where the values a node are calculated from the values at the parent, siblings, and/or the children of . A linear attribute grammar, is an attribute grammar where all dependencies are linear. Our contributions can be summarized as follows. We provide a framework for maintaining attribute systems on trees in a fully dynamic environment. We show that given a ...

This paper presents a deterministic and e#cient algorithm for online facility location. The algorithm is based on a simple hierarchical partitioning and is extremely simple to implement. It also applies to a variety of models, i.e., models where the facilities can be placed anywhere in the region, or only at customer sites, or only at fixed locations. The paper shows that the algorithm is O(log n)-competitive under these various models. It also shows that the algorithm is O(1)-competitive with high probability and for any arrival order when customers are uniformly distributed or when they follow a distribution satisfying a smoothness property. Experimental results for a variety of scenarios indicate that the algorithm behaves extremely well in practice.

ere capable of anything and instilling in us a desire to be the best in whatever we did. I would also like to thank my high school teachers Mr. Jaypal Chandra and Ms. Bhuvaneshvari for showing me that education could be fun, and Professors. M.V. Tamhankar, and H. Subramanian for some truly inspiring courses in mathematics. At Brown, I would like to thank Professors Philip Klein, Roberto Tamassia, and Jeff Vitter for advising this thesis and for teaching me much of what I know. I would like to thank Prof. Vitter for introducing me to research and for his confidence in my abilities. His constant encouragement kept me motivated during times when the going was tough. I would like to thank Prof. Tamassia for encouraging my interest in dynamic graph algorithms and for suggesting the problem solved in Chapter 5. A large portion of the results in this thesis were obtained in joint work with Prof. Phil Klein. I would like to thank him for his boundless enthusiasm for research and for the innume