Efficient Decision Procedures for Graph Properties on Context-Free Graph Languages

Abstract

Efficient ways of analyzing families of graphs that are generated by a certain type of context-free graph grammars are considered. These graph grammars are called cellular graph grammars. They generate the same graph families as hyperedge replacement systems, but are defined in a way that supports complexity analysis. A characteristic called “finiteness” of graph properties are defined, and combinatorial algorithms are presented for deciding whether a graph language generated by a given cellular graph grammar contains a graph with a given finite graph property. Structural parameters are introduced that bound the complexity of the decision procedure and special cases for which the decision can be made in polynomial time are discussed. Extensions to graph grammars that are not context-free are also given. Our results provide explicit and efficient combinatorial algorithms where, so far, only the existence of algorithms has been shown, or the best known algorithms are highly inefficient. © 1993, ACM. All rights reserved.