Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Parameterized and Exact Computation, Part I

Venkatesh Raman, Saket Saurabh
2011 Algorithmica  
The papers in this issue form the first part of the two parts special issue in the area of parameterized and exact exponential algorithms and complexity. While some of these are selected and extended papers from International Symposium on Parameterized and Exact Computation (IPEC) 2010, the rest were selected from the submissions received for our call for the special issue in the area. The two parts reflect the volume of high quality submissions we received, which in turn reflects the high
more » ... h of the area in recent times. The papers in this issue represent the subareas of recent growth in the area including variations of Robertson-Seymour and Courcelle's theorems, kernelization and structural parameterization. In parameterized (or multivariate) complexity, the aim is to design and analyse algorithms focussing on various parameters in the input-besides the standard input size. In particular, for hard problems, the aim is to confine the combinatorial explosion of the running time of the algorithms to small parameters in the input. Besides giving rise to new and interesting algorithm design techniques and complexity paradigms, the area has been highly successful in domains (like computational biology and artificial intelligence) where small parameters govern practical situations. While most of the initial work in the area considered the size of the solution as the parameter, there has been a lot of work in recent times to consider an ecology of parameters including various 'structural' parameters. The size of the vertex cover (which measures how far the graph is from an edgeless graph) and the feedback vertex set (which measures how far the graph is from a forest) are such parameters especially on graph problems. The paper 'Well Quasi orders in subclasses of bounded treewidth
doi:10.1007/s00453-011-9605-3 fatcat:5bwu4ykmlrcypdm5wzdvtehirq