📝 SummarXiv

Abstract

We consider partially ordered sets of combinatorial structures under consecutive orders, meaning that two structures are related when one embeds in the other such that `consecutive' elements remain consecutive in the image. Given such a partially ordered set, we may ask decidability questions about its avoidance sets: subsets defined by a finite number of forbidden substructures. Two such questions ask, given a finite set of structures, whether its avoidance set is well quasi-ordered (i.e. contains no infinite antichains) or atomic (i.e. cannot be expressed as the union of two proper subsets). Extending some recent new approaches, we will establish a general framework, which enables us to answer these problems for a wide class of combinatorial structures, including graphs, digraphs and collections of relations.