Like other cellular decomposition methods, this method transforms the configuration space into cell regions that can be used for path planning.

Such decomposition methods often allow a simple distributed method for a problem.

The width of a decomposition method is a measure of the size of problem it produced.

The following are the decomposition methods defined for binary constraint satisfaction problems.

Join-tree clustering can be seen as a decomposition method in which:

The width of instances is a form of efficiency of decomposition methods.

The comparison between all other decomposition methods is based on generalization and beating.

Beating means that there are classes of problems that have fixed width according to a decomposition method but not according to another.

While most tractable structural restrictions derive from fixing the width of a decomposition method, others have been developed.

In applied mathematics and computer science, variable splitting is a decomposition method that relaxes a set of constraints.