Efficient polynomial-time algorithms for the constrained LCS problem with strings exclusion

Abstract

In this paper, we revisit a recent variant of the longest common subsequence (LCS) problem, the string-excluding constrained LCS (STR-EC-LCS) problem, which was first addressed by Chen and Chao (J Comb Optim 21(3):383---392, 2011). Given two sequences $$X$$ and $$Y$$ of lengths $$m$$ and $$n,$$ respectively, and a constraint string $$P$$ of length $$r,$$ we are to find a common subsequence $$Z$$ of $$X$$ and $$Y$$ which excludes $$P$$ as a substring and the length of $$Z$$ is maximized. In fact, this problem cannot be correctly solved by the previously proposed algorithm. Thus, we give a correct algorithm with $$O(mnr)$$ time to solve it. Then, we revisit the STR-EC-LCS problem with multiple constraints $$\{ P_1, P_2, \ldots , P_k \}.$$ We propose a polynomial-time algorithm which runs in $$O(mnR)$$ time, where $$R = \sum _{i=1}^{k} |P_i|,$$ and thus it overthrows the previous claim of NP-hardness.