Algorithmic aspects of the substitution decomposition in optimization over relations,set systems and Boolean functions

In the last years, decomposition techniques have seen an increasing application to the solution of problems from operations research and combinatorial optimization, in particular in network theory and graph theory. This paper gives a broad treatment of a particular aspect of this approach, viz. the design of algorithms to compute the decomposition possibilities for a large class of discrete structures. The decomposition considered is thesubstitution decomposition (also known as modular decomposition, disjunctive decomposition, X-join or ordinal sum). Under rather general assumptions on the type of structure considered, these (possibly exponentially many) decomposition possibilities can be appropriately represented in acomposition tree of polynomial size. The task of determining this tree is shown to be polynomially equivalent to the seemingly weaker task of determining the closed hull of a given set w.r.t. a closure operation associated with the substitution decomposition. Based on this reduction, we show that for arbitrary relations the composition tree can be constructed in polynomial time. For clutters and monotonic Boolean functions, this task of constructing the closed hull is shown to be Turing-reducible to the problem of determining the circuits of the independence system associated with the clutter or the prime implicants of the Boolean function. This leads to polynomial algorithms for special clutters or monotonic Boolean functions. However, these results seem not to be extendable to the general case, as we derive exponential lower bounds for oracle decomposition algorithms for arbitrary set systems and Boolean functions.