Well quasi orderings (WQOs) are at the heart of the theory of Well-Structured Systems (WSTS), a class of computational models that brought numerous important advances for the automatic verification of infinite-state systems. Recent developments in this field links the complexity of WQO-based algorithms to ordinal measures of WQOs : the maximal order type, ordinal height and ordinal width.

One main challenge is to compute the ordinal invariants of complex well quasi-orders built from simpler well quasi-orders through classical operation, such as the Cartesian product, and high-order constructions, like the finite words embedding. In my thesis, I computed compositionally the maximal order type of the direct product, the width of the multiset embedding, and the height and width of the multiset ordering. Furthermore, I compute the width of the Cartesian product in restricted cases and studied the ordinal measures of the finite powerset.In the process, I developed several tools and techniques, notably a game-theoretical approach to computing width using the notion of quasi-incomparable families of subsets. To tackle the width of the multiset ordering, I introduced and studied a fourth ordinal invariant, the friendly order type.