Book Description

This book, Advanced Tools and Methods for Treewidth-Based Problem Solving, contains selected results from the author’s PhD studies, which were carried out from 2015 to 2021. For his PhD thesis, Markus Hecher received the EurAI Dissertation Award 2021 and the GI Dissertation Award 2021, amongst others. The aim of the book is to present a new toolkit for using the structural parameter of treewidth to solve problems in knowledge representation and reasoning (KR) and artificial intelligence (AI), thereby establishing both theoretical upper and lower bounds, as well as methods to deal with treewidth efficiently in practice. The key foundations outlined in the book provide runtime lower bounds – under reasonable assumptions in computational complexity – for evaluating quantified Boolean formulas and logic programs which match the known upper bounds already published in 2004 and 2009. The general nature of the developed tools and techniques means that a wide applicability beyond the selected problems and formalisms tackled in the book is anticipated, and it is hoped that the book will serve as a starting point for future theoretical and practical investigations, which will no doubt establish further results and gain deeper insights.