A survey on algorithmic aspects of modular decomposition

The modular decomposition is a technique that applies but is not restricted to graphs. The notion of module naturally appears in the proofs of many graph theoretical theorems. Computing the modular decomposition tree is an important preprocessing step to solve a large number of combinatorial optimization problems. Since the first polynomial time algorithm in the early 70's, the algorithmic of the modular decomposition has known an important development. This paper survey the ideas and techniques that arose from this line of research

Subclasses of Normal Helly Circular-Arc Graphs

A Helly circular-arc model M = (C,A) is a circle C together with a Helly family \A of arcs of C. If no arc is contained in any other, then M is a proper Helly circular-arc model, if every arc has the same length, then M is a unit Helly circular-arc model, and if there are no two arcs covering the circle, then M is a normal Helly circular-arc model. A Helly (resp. proper Helly, unit Helly, normal Helly) circular-arc graph is the intersection graph of the arcs of a Helly (resp. proper Helly, unit Helly, normal Helly) circular-arc model. In this article we study these subclasses of Helly circular-arc graphs. We show natural generalizations of several properties of (proper) interval graphs that hold for some of these Helly circular-arc subclasses. Next, we describe characterizations for the subclasses of Helly circular-arc graphs, including forbidden induced subgraphs characterizations. These characterizations lead to efficient algorithms for recognizing graphs within these classes. Finally, we show how do these classes of graphs relate with straight and round digraphs.Comment: 39 pages, 13 figures. A previous version of the paper (entitled Proper Helly Circular-Arc Graphs) appeared at WG'0

Simultaneous Representation of Proper and Unit Interval Graphs

In a confluence of combinatorics and geometry, simultaneous representations provide a way to realize combinatorial objects that share common structure. A standard case in the study of simultaneous representations is the sunflower case where all objects share the same common structure. While the recognition problem for general simultaneous interval graphs - the simultaneous version of arguably one of the most well-studied graph classes - is NP-complete, the complexity of the sunflower case for three or more simultaneous interval graphs is currently open. In this work we settle this question for proper interval graphs. We give an algorithm to recognize simultaneous proper interval graphs in linear time in the sunflower case where we allow any number of simultaneous graphs. Simultaneous unit interval graphs are much more "rigid" and therefore have less freedom in their representation. We show they can be recognized in time O(|V|*|E|) for any number of simultaneous graphs in the sunflower case where G=(V,E) is the union of the simultaneous graphs. We further show that both recognition problems are in general NP-complete if the number of simultaneous graphs is not fixed. The restriction to the sunflower case is in this sense necessary