On the Width of Regular Classes of Finite Structures

In this work, we introduce the notion of decisional width of a finite relational structure and the notion of decisional width of a regular class of finite structures. Our main result states that given a first-order formula psi over a vocabulary τ, and a finite automaton F over a suitable alphabet B(Sigma,w,τ) representing a width-w regular-decisional class of τ-structures C, one can decide in time f(τ,Sigma,psi,w)|F| whether some τ-structure in C satisfies psi. Here, f is a function that depends on the parameters τ,Sigma,psi,w, but not on the size of the automaton F representing the class. Therefore, besides implying that the first-order theory of any given regular-decisional class of finite structures is decidable, it also implies that when the parameters τ, psi, Sigma and w are fixed, decidability can be achieved in linear time on the size of the input automaton F. Building on the proof of our main result, we show that the problem of counting satisfying assignments for a first-order logic formula in a given structure A of width w is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to w, and can be solved in quadratic time on the length of the input representation of A.