207 research outputs found
Between Treewidth and Clique-width
Many hard graph problems can be solved efficiently when restricted to graphs
of bounded treewidth, and more generally to graphs of bounded clique-width. But
there is a price to be paid for this generality, exemplified by the four
problems MaxCut, Graph Coloring, Hamiltonian Cycle and Edge Dominating Set that
are all FPT parameterized by treewidth but none of which can be FPT
parameterized by clique-width unless FPT = W[1], as shown by Fomin et al [7,
8]. We therefore seek a structural graph parameter that shares some of the
generality of clique-width without paying this price. Based on splits, branch
decompositions and the work of Vatshelle [18] on Maximum Matching-width, we
consider the graph parameter sm-width which lies between treewidth and
clique-width. Some graph classes of unbounded treewidth, like
distance-hereditary graphs, have bounded sm-width. We show that MaxCut, Graph
Coloring, Hamiltonian Cycle and Edge Dominating Set are all FPT parameterized
by sm-width
Fly-automata for checking MSO 2 graph properties
A more descriptive but too long title would be : Constructing fly-automata to
check properties of graphs of bounded tree-width expressed by monadic
second-order formulas written with edge quantifications. Such properties are
called MSO2 in short. Fly-automata (FA) run bottom-up on terms denoting graphs
and compute "on the fly" the necessary states and transitions instead of
looking into huge, actually unimplementable tables. In previous works, we have
constructed FA that process terms denoting graphs of bounded clique-width, in
order to check their monadic second-order (MSO) properties (expressed by
formulas without edge quan-tifications). Here, we adapt these FA to incidence
graphs, so that they can check MSO2 properties of graphs of bounded tree-width.
This is possible because: (1) an MSO2 property of a graph is nothing but an MSO
property of its incidence graph and (2) the clique-width of the incidence graph
of a graph is linearly bounded in terms of its tree-width. Our constructions
are actually implementable and usable. We detail concrete constructions of
automata in this perspective.Comment: Submitted for publication in December 201
Are there any good digraph width measures?
Several different measures for digraph width have appeared in the last few
years. However, none of them shares all the "nice" properties of treewidth:
First, being \emph{algorithmically useful} i.e. admitting polynomial-time
algorithms for all \MS1-definable problems on digraphs of bounded width. And,
second, having nice \emph{structural properties} i.e. being monotone under
taking subdigraphs and some form of arc contractions. As for the former,
(undirected) \MS1 seems to be the least common denominator of all reasonably
expressive logical languages on digraphs that can speak about the edge/arc
relation on the vertex set.The latter property is a necessary condition for a
width measure to be characterizable by some version of the cops-and-robber game
characterizing the ordinary treewidth. Our main result is that \emph{any
reasonable} algorithmically useful and structurally nice digraph measure cannot
be substantially different from the treewidth of the underlying undirected
graph. Moreover, we introduce \emph{directed topological minors} and argue that
they are the weakest useful notion of minors for digraphs
Oriented coloring on recursively defined digraphs
Coloring is one of the most famous problems in graph theory. The coloring
problem on undirected graphs has been well studied, whereas there are very few
results for coloring problems on directed graphs. An oriented k-coloring of an
oriented graph G=(V,A) is a partition of the vertex set V into k independent
sets such that all the arcs linking two of these subsets have the same
direction. The oriented chromatic number of an oriented graph G is the smallest
k such that G allows an oriented k-coloring. Deciding whether an acyclic
digraph allows an oriented 4-coloring is NP-hard. It follows, that finding the
chromatic number of an oriented graph is an NP-hard problem. This motivates to
consider the problem on oriented co-graphs. After giving several
characterizations for this graph class, we show a linear time algorithm which
computes an optimal oriented coloring for an oriented co-graph. We further
prove how the oriented chromatic number can be computed for the disjoint union
and order composition from the oriented chromatic number of the involved
oriented co-graphs. It turns out that within oriented co-graphs the oriented
chromatic number is equal to the length of a longest oriented path plus one. We
also show that the graph isomorphism problem on oriented co-graphs can be
solved in linear time.Comment: 14 page
Walking Through Waypoints
We initiate the study of a fundamental combinatorial problem: Given a
capacitated graph , find a shortest walk ("route") from a source to a destination that includes all vertices specified by a set
: the \emph{waypoints}. This waypoint routing problem
finds immediate applications in the context of modern networked distributed
systems. Our main contribution is an exact polynomial-time algorithm for graphs
of bounded treewidth. We also show that if the number of waypoints is
logarithmically bounded, exact polynomial-time algorithms exist even for
general graphs. Our two algorithms provide an almost complete characterization
of what can be solved exactly in polynomial-time: we show that more general
problems (e.g., on grid graphs of maximum degree 3, with slightly more
waypoints) are computationally intractable
Long induced paths in graphs
We prove that every 3-connected planar graph on vertices contains an
induced path on vertices, which is best possible and improves
the best known lower bound by a multiplicative factor of . We
deduce that any planar graph (or more generally, any graph embeddable on a
fixed surface) with a path on vertices, also contains an induced path on
vertices. We conjecture that for any , there is a
contant such that any -degenerate graph with a path on vertices
also contains an induced path on vertices. We provide
examples showing that this order of magnitude would be best possible (already
for chordal graphs), and prove the conjecture in the case of interval graphs.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures - revised versio
More applications of the d-neighbor equivalence: acyclicity and connectivity constraints
In this paper, we design a framework to obtain efficient algorithms for
several problems with a global constraint (acyclicity or connectivity) such as
Connected Dominating Set, Node Weighted Steiner Tree, Maximum Induced Tree,
Longest Induced Path, and Feedback Vertex Set. We design a meta-algorithm that
solves all these problems and whose running time is upper bounded by
, , and where is respectively the clique-width,
-rank-width, rank-width and maximum induced matching width of a
given decomposition. Our meta-algorithm simplifies and unifies the known
algorithms for each of the parameters and its running time matches
asymptotically also the running times of the best known algorithms for basic
NP-hard problems such as Vertex Cover and Dominating Set. Our framework is
based on the -neighbor equivalence defined in [Bui-Xuan, Telle and
Vatshelle, TCS 2013]. The results we obtain highlight the importance of this
equivalence relation on the algorithmic applications of width measures.
We also prove that our framework could be useful for -hard problems
parameterized by clique-width such as Max Cut and Maximum Minimal Cut. For
these latter problems, we obtain , and time
algorithms where is respectively the clique-width, the
-rank-width and the rank-width of the input graph
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