Dynamic Programming on Tree Decompositions in Practice - Some Lessons Learned

Many prominent NP-hard problems have been shown tractable for bounded treewidth. To put these results to practice, dynamic programming (DP) via a traversal of the nodes of a tree decomposition is the standard technique. However, the concrete implementation of suitable efficient algorithms is often tedious. To this end, we have developed the D-FLAT system, which [1]-[4] allows the user to specify the DP algorithm in a declarative fashion and where the computation of intermediate solutions is delegated to a logic-programming system. In this talk, we first give a brief introduction to the D-FLAT system and demonstrate its usage on some standard DP algorithms. In the second part of the talk, we reflect on some of our experiences.