Recent Developments in the Theory of Pre-processing

Abstract

Although pre-processing is a practical computing strategy almost universally employed for real-world attacks on NP-hard problems, it is perhaps surprising that for more than thirty years there has been no mathematically-disciplined theory of the subject. The parameterized / multivariate view of computational complexity makes such a theory possible, and this turns out to be deeply productive and useful. In the theory of parameterized complexity and algorithmics, the subject is termed kernelization. We survey the origins, recent developments and applications of the theory of polynomial-time kernelization.