Decomposition method (constraint satisfaction)

In constraint satisfaction, a decomposition method translates a constraint satisfaction problem into another constraint satisfaction problem that is binary and acyclic. Decomposition methods work by grouping variables into sets, and solving a subproblem for each set. These translations are done because solving binary acyclic problems is a tractable problem.

Each structural restriction defined a measure of complexity of solving the problem after conversion; this measure is called width. Fixing a maximal allowed width is a way for identifying a subclass of constraint satisfaction problems. Solving problems in this class is polynomial for most decompositions; if this holds for a decomposition, the class of fixed-width problems form a tractable subclass of constraint satisfaction problems.

Decomposition methods translate a problem into a new one that is easier to solve. The new problem only contains binary constraints; their scopes form a directed acyclic graph. The variables of the new problem represent each a set of variables of the original one. These sets are not necessarily disjoint, but they cover the set of the original variables. The translation finds all partial solutions relative to each set of variables. The problem that results from the translation represents the interactions between these local solutions.

By definition, a decomposition method produces a binary acyclic problem; such problems can be solved in time polynomial in its size. As a result, the original problem can be solved by first translating it and then solving the resulting problem; however, this algorithm is polynomial-time only if the decomposition does not increase size superpolynomially. The width of a decomposition method is a measure of the size of problem it produced. Originally, the width was defined as the maximal cardinality of the sets of original variables; one method, the hypertree decomposition, uses a different measure. Either way, the width of a decomposition is defined so that decompositions of size bounded by a constant do not produce excessively large problems. Instances having a decomposition of fixed width can be translated by decomposition into instances of size bounded by a polynomial in the size of the original instance.

The width of a problem is the width of its minimal-width decomposition. While decompositions of fixed width can be used to efficiently solve a problem, a bound on the width of instances does necessarily produce a tractable structural restriction. Indeed, a fixed width problem has a decomposition of fixed width, but finding it may not be polynomial. In order for a problem of fixed width being efficiently solved by decomposition, one of its decompositions of low width has to be found efficiently. For this reason, decomposition methods and their associated width are defined in such a way not only solving the problem given a fixed-width decomposition of it is polynomial-time, but also finding a fixed width decomposition of a fixed-width problem is polynomial-time.

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