Quadratic Word Equations with Length Constraints, Counter Systems, and Presburger Arithmetic with Divisibility

Word equations are a crucial element in the theoretical foundation of constraint solving over strings. A word equation relates two words over string variables and constants. Its solution amounts to a function mapping variables to constant strings that equate the left and right hand sides of the equation. While the problem of solving word equations is decidable, the decidability of the problem of solving a word equation with a length constraint (i.e., a constraint relating the lengths of words in the word equation) has remained a long-standing open problem. We focus on the subclass of quadratic word equations, i.e., in which each variable occurs at most twice. We first show that the length abstractions of solutions to quadratic word equations are in general not Presburger-definable. We then describe a class of counter systems with Presburger transition relations which capture the length abstraction of a quadratic word equation with regular constraints. We provide an encoding of the effect of a simple loop of the counter systems in the existential theory of Presburger Arithmetic with divisibility (PAD). Since PAD is decidable (NP-hard and is in NEXP), we obtain a decision procedure for quadratic words equations with length constraints for which the associated counter system is flat (i.e., all nodes belong to at most one cycle). In particular, we show a decidability result (in fact, also an NP algorithm with a PAD oracle) for a recently proposed NP-complete fragment of word equations called regular-oriented word equations, when augmented with length constraints. We extend this decidability result (in fact, with a complexity upper bound of PSPACE with a PAD oracle) in the presence of regular constraints.

On the structure of solution-sets to regular word equations

For quadratic word equations, there exists an algorithm based on rewriting rules which generates a directed graph describing all solutions to the equation. For regular word equations – those for which each variable occurs at most once on each side of the equation – we investigate the properties of this graph, such as bounds on its diameter, size, and DAG-width, as well as providing some insights into symmetries in its structure. As a consequence, we obtain a combinatorial proof that the problem of deciding whether a regular word equation has a solution is in NP.

Solutions to twisted word equations and equations in virtually free groups

It is well known that the problem solving equations in virtually free groups can be reduced to the problem of solving twisted word equations with regular constraints over free monoids with involution. In this paper, we prove that the set of all solutions of a twisted word equation is an EDT0L language whose specification can be computed in PSPACE . Within the same complexity bound we can decide whether the solution set is empty, finite, or infinite. In the second part of the paper we apply the results for twisted equations to obtain in PSPACE an EDT0L description of the solution set of equations with rational constraints for finitely generated virtually free groups in standard normal forms with respect to a natural set of generators. If the rational constraints are given by a homomorphism into a fixed (or “small enough”) finite monoid, then our algorithms can be implemented in [Formula: see text], that is, in quasi-quadratic nondeterministic space. Our results generalize the work by Lohrey and Sénizergues (ICALP 2006) and Dahmani and Guirardel (J. of Topology 2010) with respect to both complexity and expressive power. Neither paper gave any concrete complexity bound and the results in these papers are stated for subsets of solutions only, whereas our results concern all solutions.