The Complexity of Combinations of Qualitative Constraint Satisfaction Problems

Abstract

The CSP of a first-order theory $T$ is the problem of deciding for a given finite set $S$ of atomic formulas whether $T\cup S$ is satisfiable. Let $T_1$ and $T_2$ be two theories with countably infinite models and disjoint signatures. Nelson and Oppen presented conditions that imply decidability (or polynomial-time decidability) of $\mathrm{CSP}(T_1\cup T_2)$ under the assumption that $\mathrm{CSP}(T_1)$ and $\mathrm{CSP}(T_2)$ are decidable (or polynomial-time decidable). We show that for a large class of $\omega$-categorical theories $T_1,T_2$ the Nelson-Oppen conditions are not only sufficient, but also necessary for polynomial-time tractability of $\mathrm{CSP}(T_1\cup T_2)$ (unless P=NP).

References in corpus (1)

• The undecidability of joint embedding and joint homomorphism for hereditary graph classes