Monadic second-order definable graph orderings

We study the question of whether, for a given class of finite graphs, one can define, for each graph of the class, a linear ordering in monadic second-order logic, possibly with the help of monadic parameters. We consider two variants of monadic second-order logic: one where we can only quantify over sets of vertices and one where we can also quantify over sets of edges. For several special cases, we present combinatorial characterisations of when such a linear ordering is definable. In some cases, for instance for graph classes that omit a fixed graph as a minor, the presented conditions are necessary and sufficient; in other cases, they are only necessary. Other graph classes we consider include complete bipartite graphs, split graphs, chordal graphs, and cographs. We prove that orderability is decidable for the so called HR-equational classes of graphs, which are described by equation systems and generalize the context-free languages

Regular Tree Algebras

We introduce a class of algebras that can be used as recognisers for regular tree languages. We show that it is the only such class that forms a pseudo-variety and we prove the existence of syntactic algebras. Finally, we give a more algebraic characterisation of the algebras in our class

?-Forest Algebras and Temporal Logics

We use the algebraic framework for languages of infinite trees introduced in [A. Blumensath, 2020] to derive effective characterisations of various temporal logics, in particular the logic EF (a fragment of CTL) and its counting variant cEF

Decidability Results for the Boundedness Problem

We prove decidability of the boundedness problem for monadic least fixed-point recursion based on positive monadic second-order (MSO) formulae over trees. Given an MSO-formula phi(X,x) that is positive in X, it is decidable whether the fixed-point recursion based on phi is spurious over the class of all trees in the sense that there is some uniform finite bound for the number of iterations phi takes to reach its least fixed point, uniformly across all trees. We also identify the exact complexity of this problem. The proof uses automata-theoretic techniques. This key result extends, by means of model-theoretic interpretations, to show decidability of the boundedness problem for MSO and guarded second-order logic (GSO) over the classes of structures of fixed finite tree-width. Further model-theoretic transfer arguments allow us to derive major known decidability results for boundedness for fragments of first-order logic as well as new ones

Guarded Second-Order Logic, Spanning Trees, and Network Flows

According to a theorem of Courcelle monadic second-order logic and guarded second-order logic (where one can also quantify over sets of edges) have the same expressive power over the class of all countable $k$-sparse hypergraphs. In the first part of the present paper we extend this result to hypergraphs of arbitrary cardinality. In the second part, we present a generalisation dealing with methods to encode sets of vertices by single vertices

On a Fragment of AMSO and Tiling Systems

We prove that satisfiability over infinite words is decidable for a fragment of asymptotic monadic second-order logic. In this fragment we only allow formulae of the form "exists t forall s exists r: phi(r,s,t)", where phi does not use quantifiers over number variables, and variables r and s can be only used simultaneously, in subformulae of the form s < f(x) <= r