Stability of Triangular Decomposition and Comprehensive Triangular Decomposition

Abstract

A new concept, decomposition-unstable (DU) variety of a parametric polynomial system, is introduced in this paper and the stabilities of several triangular decomposition methods, such as characteristic set decomposition, relatively simplicial decomposition and regular chain decomposition, for parametric polynomial systems are discussed in detail. The concept leads to a definition of weakly comprehensive triangular decomposition (WCTD) and a new algorithm for computing comprehensive triangular decomposition (CTD) which was first introduced in [4] for computing an analogue of comprehensive Groebner systems for parametric polynomial systems. Our algorithm takes advantage of a hierarchical solving strategy and a self-adaptive order of parameters. The algorithm has been implemented with Maple 15 and experimented with a number of benchmarks from the literature. Comparison with the Maple package RegularChains, which contains an implementation of the algorithm in [4], is provided and the results illustrate that the time costs by our program for computing CTDs of most examples are no more than those by RegularChains.