Width parameters beyond tree-width and their applications

Abstract

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.