Inducing Lattices in Non-Lattice-Linear Problems

Lattice-linearity was introduced as modelling problems using predicates that induce a lattice among the global states (Garg, SPAA 2020). Such modelling enables permitting asynchronous execution in multiprocessor systems. A key property of the predicate representing such problems is that it induces one lattice in the state space. Such representation guarantees the execution to be correct even if nodes execute asynchronously. However, many interesting problems do not exhibit lattice-linearity. This issue was alleviated with the introduction of eventually lattice-linear algorithms (Gupta and Kulkarni, SSS 2021). They induce single or multiple lattices in a subset of the state space even when the problem cannot be defined by a predicate under which the states form a lattice. In this paper, we focus on analyzing and differentiating between lattice-linear problems and algorithms. We introduce a new class of algorithms called fully lattice-linear algorithms. These algorithms partition the entire reachable state space into one or more lattices. For illustration, we present lattice-linear self-stabilizing algorithms for minimal dominating set (MDS) and graph colouring (GC) problems, and a parallel processing lattice-linear 2-approximation algorithm for vertex cover (VC). The algorithms for MDS and GC converge in
$n$
moves and
$n+2m$
moves respectively. These algorithms preserve this time complexity while allowing the nodes to execute asynchronously, where these nodes may execute based on old or inconsistent information about their neighbours. The algorithm for VC is the first lattice-linear approximation algorithm for an NP-Hard problem; it converges in
$n$
moves.