We study the satisfiability of string constraints where context-free membership constraints may be imposed on variables. Additionally a variable may be constrained to be a subword of a word obtained by shuffling variables and their transductions. The satisfiability problem is known to be undecidable even without rational transductions. It is known to be NExptime-complete without transductions, if the subword relations between variables do not have a cyclic dependency between them. We show that the satisfiability problem stays decidable in this fragment even when rational transductions are added. It is 2NExptime-complete with context-free membership, and NExptime-complete with only regular membership. For the lower bound we prove a technical lemma that is of independent interest: The length of the shortest word in the intersection of a pushdown automaton (of size $O(n)$) and $n$ finite-state automata (each of size $O(n)$) can be double exponential in $n$.

We consider a variant of string constraints given by membership constraints in context-free languages and subword relation between variables. The satisfiability problem for this variant turns out to be undecidable. We consider a fragment in which the subword-order constraints do not impose any cyclic dependency between variables. We show that this fragment is NexpTime-complete. As an application of our result, we settle the complexity of control state reachability in acyclic lossy channel pushdown systems, an important distributed system model. The problem was shown to be decidable in [8]. However, no elementary upper bound was known. We show that this problem is NexpTime-complete.