On the intersection of tolerance and cocomparability graphs.

Tolerance graphs have been extensively studied since their introduction, due to their interesting structure and their numerous applications, as they generalize both interval and permutation graphs in a natural way. It has been conjectured by Golumbic, Monma, and Trotter in 1984 that the intersection of tolerance and cocomparability graphs coincides with bounded tolerance graphs. Since cocomparability graphs can be efficiently recognized, a positive answer to this conjecture in the general case would enable us to efficiently distinguish between tolerance and bounded tolerance graphs, although it is NP-complete to recognize each of these classes of graphs separately. This longstanding conjecture has been proved under some – rather strong – structural assumptions on the input graph; in particular, it has been proved for complements of trees, and later extended to complements of bipartite graphs, and these are the only known results so far. Furthermore, it is known that the intersection of tolerance and cocomparability graphs is contained in the class of trapezoid graphs. Our main result in this article is that the above conjecture is true for every graph G that admits a tolerance representation with exactly one unbounded vertex; note that this assumption concerns only the given tolerance representation R of G, rather than any structural property of G. Moreover, our results imply as a corollary that the conjecture of Golumbic, Monma, and Trotter is true for every graph G = (V,E) that has no three independent vertices a, b, c ∈ V such that N(a) ⊂ N(b) ⊂ N(c), where N(v) denotes the set of neighbors of a vertex v ∈ V ; this is satisfied in particular when G is the complement of a triangle-free graph (which also implies the above-mentioned correctness for complements of bipartite graphs). Our proofs are constructive, in the sense that, given a tolerance representation R of a graph G, we transform R into a bounded tolerance representation R of G. Furthermore, we conjecture that any minimal tolerance graph G that is not a bounded tolerance graph, has a tolerance representation with exactly one unbounded vertex. Our results imply the non-trivial result that, in order to prove the conjecture of Golumbic, Monma, and Trotter, it suffices to prove our conjecture

On the intersection of tolerance and cocomparability graphs.

It has been conjectured by Golumbic and Monma in 1984 that the intersection of tolerance and cocomparability graphs coincides with bounded tolerance graphs. Since cocomparability graphs can be efficiently recognized, a positive answer to this conjecture in the general case would enable us to efficiently distinguish between tolerance and bounded tolerance graphs, although it is NP-complete to recognize each of these classes of graphs separately. The conjecture has been proved under some – rather strong – structural assumptions on the input graph; in particular, it has been proved for complements of trees, and later extended to complements of bipartite graphs, and these are the only known results so far. Furthermore, it is known that the intersection of tolerance and cocomparability graphs is contained in the class of trapezoid graphs. In this article we prove that the above conjecture is true for every graph G, whose tolerance representation satisfies a slight assumption; note here that this assumption concerns only the given tolerance representation R of G, rather than any structural property of G. This assumption on the representation is guaranteed by a wide variety of graph classes; for example, our results immediately imply the correctness of the conjecture for complements of triangle-free graphs (which also implies the above-mentioned correctness for complements of bipartite graphs). Our proofs are algorithmic, in the sense that, given a tolerance representation R of a graph G, we describe an algorithm to transform R into a bounded tolerance representation R  ∗  of G. Furthermore, we conjecture that any minimal tolerance graph G that is not a bounded tolerance graph, has a tolerance representation with exactly one unbounded vertex. Our results imply the non-trivial result that, in order to prove the conjecture of Golumbic and Monma, it suffices to prove our conjecture. In addition, there already exists evidence in the literature that our conjecture is true

On-line coloring between two lines

We study on-line colorings of certain graphs given as intersection graphs of objects "between two lines", i.e., there is a pair of horizontal lines such that each object of the representation is a connected set contained in the strip between the lines and touches both. Some of the graph classes admitting such a representation are permutation graphs (segments), interval graphs (axis-aligned rectangles), trapezoid graphs (trapezoids) and cocomparability graphs (simple curves). We present an on-line algorithm coloring graphs given by convex sets between two lines that uses $O(\omega^3)$ colors on graphs with maximum clique size $\omega$. In contrast intersection graphs of segments attached to a single line may force any on-line coloring algorithm to use an arbitrary number of colors even when $\omega=2$. The {\em left-of} relation makes the complement of intersection graphs of objects between two lines into a poset. As an aside we discuss the relation of the class $\mathcal{C}$ of posets obtained from convex sets between two lines with some other classes of posets: all $2$-dimensional posets and all posets of height $2$ are in $\mathcal{C}$ but there is a $3$-dimensional poset of height $3$ that does not belong to $\mathcal{C}$. We also show that the on-line coloring problem for curves between two lines is as hard as the on-line chain partition problem for arbitrary posets.Comment: grant support adde