A trichotomy for regular simple path queries on graphs

International audienceWe focus on the computational complexity of regular simple path queries (RSPQs). We consider the following problem RSPQ(L) for a regular language L: given an edge-labeled digraph Gand two nodes xand y, is there a simple path from x to y that forms a word belonging to L? We fully characterize the frontier between tractability and intractability for RSPQ(L). More precisely, we prove RSPQ(L)is either AC0, NL-complete or NP-complete depending on the language L. We also provide a simple characterization of the tractable fragment in terms of regular expressions. Finally, we also discuss the complexity of deciding whether a language L belongs to the fragment above. We consider several alternative representations of L: DFAs, NFAs or regular expressions, and prove that this problem is NL-complete for the first representation and PSpace-complete for the other two