Hybrid tractability of soft constraint problems

The constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is a central generic problem in computer science and artificial intelligence: it provides a common framework for many theoretical problems as well as for many real-life applications. Soft constraint problems are a generalisation of the CSP which allow the user to model optimisation problems. Considerable effort has been made in identifying properties which ensure tractability in such problems. In this work, we initiate the study of hybrid tractability of soft constraint problems; that is, properties which guarantee tractability of the given soft constraint problem, but which do not depend only on the underlying structure of the instance (such as being tree-structured) or only on the types of soft constraints in the instance (such as submodularity). We present several novel hybrid classes of soft constraint problems, which include a machine scheduling problem, constraint problems of arbitrary arities with no overlapping nogoods, and the SoftAllDiff constraint with arbitrary unary soft constraints. An important tool in our investigation will be the notion of forbidden substructures.Comment: A full version of a CP'10 paper, 26 page

A note on 2--bisections of claw--free cubic graphs

A \emph{$k$--bisection} of a bridgeless cubic graph $G$ is a $2$--colouring of its vertex set such that the colour classes have the same cardinality and all connected components in the two subgraphs induced by the colour classes have order at most $k$. Ban and Linial conjectured that {\em every bridgeless cubic graph admits a $2$--bisection except for the Petersen graph}. In this note, we prove Ban--Linial's conjecture for claw--free cubic graphs

Polynomial kernelization for removing induced claws and diamonds

A graph is called (claw,diamond)-free if it contains neither a claw (a $K_{1,3}$) nor a diamond (a $K_4$ with an edge removed) as an induced subgraph. Equivalently, (claw,diamond)-free graphs can be characterized as line graphs of triangle-free graphs, or as linear dominoes, i.e., graphs in which every vertex is in at most two maximal cliques and every edge is in exactly one maximal clique. In this paper we consider the parameterized complexity of the (claw,diamond)-free Edge Deletion problem, where given a graph $G$ and a parameter $k$, the question is whether one can remove at most $k$ edges from $G$ to obtain a (claw,diamond)-free graph. Our main result is that this problem admits a polynomial kernel. We complement this finding by proving that, even on instances with maximum degree $6$, the problem is NP-complete and cannot be solved in time $2^{o(k)}\cdot |V(G)|^{O(1)}$ unless the Exponential Time Hypothesis fai

Independent sets of maximum weight in apple-free graphs

We present the first polynomial-time algorithm to solve the maximum weight independent set problem for apple-free graphs, which is a common generalization of several important classes where the problem can be solved efficiently, such as claw-free graphs, chordal graphs, and cographs. Our solution is based on a combination of two algorithmic techniques (modular decomposition and decomposition by clique separators) and a deep combinatorial analysis of the structure of apple-free graphs. Our algorithm is robust in the sense that it does not require the input graph G to be apple-free; the algorithm either finds an independent set of maximum weight in G or reports that G is not apple-free