A practical algorithm for structure embedding

Abstract

This paper presents an algorithm for the structure embedding problem: given two finite first-order structures over a common relational vocabulary, does there exist an injective homomorphism from one to the other? The structure embedding problem is NP-complete in the general case, but for monadic structures (each predicate has arity ≤ 1) we observe that it can be solved in polytime by reduction to bipartite graph matching. Our algorithm, MatchEmbeds, extends the bipartite matching approach to the general case by using it as the foundation of a backtracking search procedure. We show that MatchEmbeds outperforms state-of-the-art SAT, CSP, and subgraph isomorphism solvers on difficult random instances and significantly improves the performance of a client model checker for multi-threaded programs.