Crossing Minimization for 1-page and 2-page Drawings of Graphs with Bounded Treewidth

We investigate crossing minimization for 1-page and 2-page book drawings. We show that computing the 1-page crossing number is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the number of crossings, that testing 2-page planarity is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to treewidth, and that computing the 2-page crossing number is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the sum of the number of crossings and the treewidth of the input graph. We prove these results via Courcelle's theorem on the fixed-parameter tractability of properties expressible in monadic second order logic for graphs of bounded treewidth.Comment: Graph Drawing 201

The role of twins in computing planar supports of hypergraphs

A support or realization of a hypergraph $H$ is a graph $G$ on the same vertex as $H$ such that for each hyperedge of $H$ it holds that its vertices induce a connected subgraph of $G$. The NP-hard problem of finding a planar} support has applications in hypergraph drawing and network design. Previous algorithms for the problem assume that twins}---pairs of vertices that are in precisely the same hyperedges---can safely be removed from the input hypergraph. We prove that this assumption is generally wrong, yet that the number of twins necessary for a hypergraph to have a planar support only depends on its number of hyperedges. We give an explicit upper bound on the number of twins necessary for a hypergraph with $m$ hyperedges to have an $r$-outerplanar support, which depends only on $r$ and $m$. Since all additional twins can be safely removed, we obtain a linear-time algorithm for computing $r$-outerplanar supports for hypergraphs with $m$ hyperedges if $m$ and $r$ are constant; in other words, the problem is fixed-parameter linear-time solvable with respect to the parameters $m$ and $r$

Conflict-Free Coloring of Planar Graphs

A conflict-free k-coloring of a graph assigns one of k different colors to some of the vertices such that, for every vertex v, there is a color that is assigned to exactly one vertex among v and v's neighbors. Such colorings have applications in wireless networking, robotics, and geometry, and are well-studied in graph theory. Here we study the natural problem of the conflict-free chromatic number chi_CF(G) (the smallest k for which conflict-free k-colorings exist). We provide results both for closed neighborhoods N[v], for which a vertex v is a member of its neighborhood, and for open neighborhoods N(v), for which vertex v is not a member of its neighborhood. For closed neighborhoods, we prove the conflict-free variant of the famous Hadwiger Conjecture: If an arbitrary graph G does not contain K_{k+1} as a minor, then chi_CF(G) <= k. For planar graphs, we obtain a tight worst-case bound: three colors are sometimes necessary and always sufficient. We also give a complete characterization of the computational complexity of conflict-free coloring. Deciding whether chi_CF(G)<= 1 is NP-complete for planar graphs G, but polynomial for outerplanar graphs. Furthermore, deciding whether chi_CF(G)<= 2 is NP-complete for planar graphs G, but always true for outerplanar graphs. For the bicriteria problem of minimizing the number of colored vertices subject to a given bound k on the number of colors, we give a full algorithmic characterization in terms of complexity and approximation for outerplanar and planar graphs. For open neighborhoods, we show that every planar bipartite graph has a conflict-free coloring with at most four colors; on the other hand, we prove that for k in {1,2,3}, it is NP-complete to decide whether a planar bipartite graph has a conflict-free k-coloring. Moreover, we establish that any general} planar graph has a conflict-free coloring with at most eight colors.Comment: 30 pages, 17 figures; full version (to appear in SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics) of extended abstract that appears in Proceeedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2017), pp. 1951-196