Fusion in relational structures and the verification of monadic second-order properties

  • Authors:

  • B. Courcelle;J. A. Makowsky

  • Affiliations:

  • CNRS, UMR 5800, Université Bordeaux I, 351 cours de la Libération, 33405 Talence, France. (courcell@labri.u-bordeaux.fr, http://dept-info.labri.u-bordeaux.fr/~courcell/ActSci.html);Department of Computer Science, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, 32000 Haifa, Israel. (janos@cs.technion.ac.il, http://cs.technion.ac.il/~janos)

  • Venue:
  • Mathematical Structures in Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Relational structures offer a common framework for handling graphs and hypergraphs of various kinds. Operations like disjoint union, the creation of new relations by means of quantifier-free formulas, and relabellings of relations make it possible to denote them using algebraic expressions. It is known that every monadic second-order property of a structure is verifiable in time proportional to the size of such an algebraic expression defining it. We prove here that this result remains true if we also use in these algebraic expressions a fusion operation that fuses all elements of the domain satisfying some unary predicate. The value mapping from these algebraic expressions to the structures they denote is a monadic second-order definable transduction, which means that the structure is definable inside the tree representing the algebraic expression by monadic second-order formulas. It follows (by using results of other articles) that, with this fusion operation, we cannot generate more graph families, but we can generate them with less unary auxiliary predicates. We also obtain clear-cut characterizations of Vertex Replacement and Hyperedge Replacement context-free graph grammars in terms of four types of operations, amongst which is the fusion of vertices satisfying a specified predicate.