How the structure of precedence constraints may change the complexity class of scheduling problems

This survey aims at demonstrating that the structure of precedence constraints plays a tremendous role on the complexity of scheduling problems. Indeed many problems can be NP-hard when considering general precedence constraints, while they become polynomially solvable for particular precedence constraints. We also show that there still are many very exciting challenges in this research area

Combinatorial Problems on HH-graphs

Bir\'{o}, Hujter, and Tuza introduced the concept of $H$-graphs (1992), intersection graphs of connected subgraphs of a subdivision of a graph $H$. They naturally generalize many important classes of graphs, e.g., interval graphs and circular-arc graphs. We continue the study of these graph classes by considering coloring, clique, and isomorphism problems on $H$-graphs. We show that for any fixed $H$ containing a certain 3-node, 6-edge multigraph as a minor that the clique problem is APX-hard on $H$-graphs and the isomorphism problem is isomorphism-complete. We also provide positive results on $H$-graphs. Namely, when $H$ is a cactus the clique problem can be solved in polynomial time. Also, when a graph $G$ has a Helly $H$-representation, the clique problem can be solved in polynomial time. Finally, we observe that one can use treewidth techniques to show that both the $k$-clique and list $k$-coloring problems are FPT on $H$-graphs. These FPT results apply more generally to treewidth-bounded graph classes where treewidth is bounded by a function of the clique number

Large induced subgraphs via triangulations and CMSO

We obtain an algorithmic meta-theorem for the following optimization problem. Let \phi\ be a Counting Monadic Second Order Logic (CMSO) formula and t be an integer. For a given graph G, the task is to maximize |X| subject to the following: there is a set of vertices F of G, containing X, such that the subgraph G[F] induced by F is of treewidth at most t, and structure (G[F],X) models \phi. Some special cases of this optimization problem are the following generic examples. Each of these cases contains various problems as a special subcase: 1) "Maximum induced subgraph with at most l copies of cycles of length 0 modulo m", where for fixed nonnegative integers m and l, the task is to find a maximum induced subgraph of a given graph with at most l vertex-disjoint cycles of length 0 modulo m. 2) "Minimum \Gamma-deletion", where for a fixed finite set of graphs \Gamma\ containing a planar graph, the task is to find a maximum induced subgraph of a given graph containing no graph from \Gamma\ as a minor. 3) "Independent \Pi-packing", where for a fixed finite set of connected graphs \Pi, the task is to find an induced subgraph G[F] of a given graph G with the maximum number of connected components, such that each connected component of G[F] is isomorphic to some graph from \Pi. We give an algorithm solving the optimization problem on an n-vertex graph G in time O(#pmc n^{t+4} f(t,\phi)), where #pmc is the number of all potential maximal cliques in G and f is a function depending of t and \phi\ only. We also show how a similar running time can be obtained for the weighted version of the problem. Pipelined with known bounds on the number of potential maximal cliques, we deduce that our optimization problem can be solved in time O(1.7347^n) for arbitrary graphs, and in polynomial time for graph classes with polynomial number of minimal separators

Induced Minor Free Graphs: Isomorphism and Clique-width

Given two graphs $G$ and $H$, we say that $G$ contains $H$ as an induced minor if a graph isomorphic to $H$ can be obtained from $G$ by a sequence of vertex deletions and edge contractions. We study the complexity of Graph Isomorphism on graphs that exclude a fixed graph as an induced minor. More precisely, we determine for every graph $H$ that Graph Isomorphism is polynomial-time solvable on $H$-induced-minor-free graphs or that it is GI-complete. Additionally, we classify those graphs $H$ for which $H$-induced-minor-free graphs have bounded clique-width. These two results complement similar dichotomies for graphs that exclude a fixed graph as an induced subgraph, minor, or subgraph.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures. An extended abstract of this paper previously appeared in the proceedings of the 41st International Workshop on Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science (WG 2015