Abstract. Tree-Decompositions are the corner-stone of many dynamic programming algorithms for solving graph problems. Since the complexity of such algorithms generally depends exponentially on the width (size of the bags) of the decomposition, much work has been devoted to compute treedecompositions with small width. However, practical algorithms computing tree-decompositions only exist for graphs with treewidth less than 4. In such graphs, the time-complexity of dynamic programming algorithms based on tree-decompositions is dominated by the size (number of bags) of the treedecompositions. It is then interesting to try to minimize the size of the tree-decompositions. In this extended abstract, we consider the problem of computing a tree-decomposition of a graph with width at most k and minimum size. More precisely, we focus on the following problem: given a fixed k ≥ 1, what is the complexity of computing a tree-decomposition of width at most k with minimum size in the class of graphs with treewidth at most k? We prove that the problem is NP-complete for any fixed k ≥ 4 and polynomial for k ≤ 2. Ongoing work also suggests it is polynomial for k = 3.
A natural treewidth counterpart of the 'length' minimization problem can be seen as minimizing, besides of the width of a tree decomposition, the number of its bags REF .
Minimum Size Tree-decompositions
Electron. Notes Discret. Math.
Electron. Notes Discret. Math.
Mathematics Computer Science