In this work we take a step towards characterising strongly flip-flat classes of graphs. Strong flip-flatness appears to be the analogue of uniform almost-wideness in the setting of dense classes of graphs. We prove that strongly flip-flat classes of graphs that are weakly sparse are indeed uniformly almost-wide.

We introduce a new logic, called cluster first-order logic, a restricted fragment of first-order logic specifically designed to study order invariance. An order-invariant formula is one on a vocabulary that contains an order; however, whether a structure satisfies it or not is independent of the interpretation of the order. We show that while order-invariant cluster first-order logic can define properties outside the scope of plain first-order logic in general, its expressive power is included in that of first-order logic when it comes to classes of bounded degree. We establish this result by explicitly constructing linear orders such that similar structures remain similar when they are expanded with these orders. This similarity-preserving, local-to-global approach is technically involved and somewhat counterintuitive, since adding an order usually reveals distinctions that are otherwise hidden due to the locality of first-order logic. We believe that this work can be a stepping stone toward applying such techniques to plain first-order logic and toward settling the question of the expressive power of order-invariant plain first-order logic.

We are interested in the following validation problem for computational reductions: for algorithmic problems $P$ and $P^\star$, is a given candidate reduction indeed a reduction from $P$ to $P^\star$? Unsurprisingly, this problem is undecidable even for very restricted classes of reductions. This leads to the question: Is there a natural, expressive class of reductions for which the validation problem can be attacked algorithmically? We answer this question positively by introducing an easy-to-use graphical specification mechanism for computational reductions, called cookbook reductions. We show that cookbook reductions are sufficiently expressive to cover many classical graph reductions and expressive enough so that SAT remains NP-complete (in the presence of a linear order). Surprisingly, the validation problem is decidable for natural and expressive subclasses of cookbook reductions.

Abstract Nowadays, sustainability and energy considerations are becoming important concerns in mitigating the destructive effects of high energy consumption on the environment. In the realm of big data era, large-scale data processing systems are considered critical energy-consumption sources that exert significant impacts on the ecosystem. With the emergence of big data environments, which lead to the production of multi-structured data, numerous solutions and technologies have arisen to efficiently process vast amounts. Recently, a centralized data repository platform called Data Lake has been proposed to manage the heterogeneous data originating from diverse sources. Sustainability issues in such data management systems have received significant attention. In the dynamic environment of big data, the risk of unpredictable workloads and excessive energy usage at various phases of the data lifecycle within the data lake emphasizes the critical need for sustainable strategies. These measures aim to minimize the adverse effects of the high energy consumption during the data management procedure. In this article, we intend to design and analyze an energy-aware strategy for a green data lake framework. This strategy prioritizes ecological concerns, particularly energy consumption, by ensuring the maintenance of sufficient quality of service in terms of data availability. We present a model based on a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) to analyze the trade-off between energy efficiency and performance of a green data lake platform.

We study the expressive power of the two-variable fragment of order-invariant first-order logic. This logic departs from first-order logic in two ways: first, formulas are only allowed to quantify over two variables. Second, formulas can use an additional binary relation, which is interpreted in the structures under scrutiny as a linear order, provided that the truth value of a sentence over a finite structure never depends on which linear order is chosen on its domain. We prove that on classes of structures of bounded degree, any property expressible in this logic is definable in first-order logic. We then show that the situation remains the same when we add counting quantifiers to this logic.

We study the expressive power of successor-invariant first-order logic, which is an extension of first-order logic where the usage of a successor relation on the vertices of the graph is allowed, as long as the validity of formulas is independent on the choice of a particular successor. We show that when the degree is bounded, successor-invariant first-order logic is no more expressive than first-order logic.

We study the expressive power of successor-invariant first-order logic, which is an extension of first-order logic where the usage of an additional successor relation on the structure is allowed, as long as the validity of formulas is independent of the choice of a particular successor on finite structures. We show that when the degree is bounded, successor-invariant first-order logic is no more expressive than first-order logic.

We show that the expressive power of order-invariant first-order logic collapses to first-order logic over hollow trees. A hollow tree is an unranked ordered tree where every non leaf node has at most four adjacent nodes: two siblings (left and right) and its first and last children. In particular there is no predicate for the linear order among siblings nor for the descendant relation. Moreover only the first and last nodes of a siblinghood are linked to their parent node, and the parent-child relation cannot be completely reconstructed in first-order.