Decomposing Quantified Conjunctive (or Disjunctive) Formulas

Abstract

Model checking-deciding if a logical sentence holds on a structure-is a basic computational task that is well-known to be intractable in general. For first-order logic on finite structures, it is PSPACE-complete, and the natural evaluation algorithm exhibits exponential dependence on the formula. We study model checking on the quantified conjunctive fragment of first-order logic, namely, prenex sentences having a purely conjunctive quantifier-free part. Following a number of works, we associate a graph to the quantifier-free part; each sentence then induces a prefixed graph, a quantifier prefix paired with a graph on its variables. We give a comprehensive classification of the sets of prefixed graphs on which model checking is tractable, based on a novel generalization of treewidth, that generalizes and places into a unified framework a number of existing results.