Hypertree decompositions: A survey

Abstract

This paper surveys recent results related to the concept of hypertree decomposition and the associated notion of hypertree width. A hypertree decomposition of a hypergraph (similar to a tree decomposition of a graph) is a suitable clustering of its hyperedges yielding a tree or a forest. Important NP hard problems become tractable if restricted to instances whose associated hypergraphs are of bounded hypertree width. We also review a number of complexity results on problems whose structure is described by acyclic or nearly acyclic hypergraphs.