The List Coloring Reconfiguration Problem for Bounded Pathwidth Graphs

We study the problem of transforming one list (vertex) coloring of a graph into another list coloring by changing only one vertex color assignment at a time, while at all times maintaining a list coloring, given a list of allowed colors for each vertex. This problem is known to be PSPACE-complete for bipartite planar graphs. In this paper, we first show that the problem remains PSPACE-complete even for bipartite series-parallel graphs, which form a proper subclass of bipartite planar graphs. We note that our reduction indeed shows the PSPACE-completeness for graphs with pathwidth two, and it can be extended for threshold graphs. In contrast, we give a polynomial-time algorithm to solve the problem for graphs with pathwidth one. Thus, this paper gives precise analyses of the problem with respect to pathwidth

Reconfiguration in bounded bandwidth and treedepth

We show that several reconfiguration problems known to be PSPACE-complete remain so even when limited to graphs of bounded bandwidth. The essential step is noticing the similarity to very limited string rewriting systems, whose ability to directly simulate Turing Machines is classically known. This resolves a question posed open in [Bonsma P., 2012]. On the other hand, we show that a large class of reconfiguration problems becomes tractable on graphs of bounded treedepth, and that this result is in some sense tight.Comment: 14 page

On the Parameterized Complexity of Reconfiguration of Connected Dominating Sets

In a reconfiguration version of a decision problem ? the input is an instance of ? and two feasible solutions S and T. The objective is to determine whether there exists a step-by-step transformation between S and T such that all intermediate steps also constitute feasible solutions. In this work, we study the parameterized complexity of the Connected Dominating Set Reconfiguration problem (CDS-R). It was shown in previous work that the Dominating Set Reconfiguration problem (DS-R) parameterized by k, the maximum allowed size of a dominating set in a reconfiguration sequence, is fixed-parameter tractable on all graphs that exclude a biclique K_{d,d} as a subgraph, for some constant d ? 1. We show that the additional connectivity constraint makes the problem much harder, namely, that CDS-R is W[1]-hard parameterized by k+?, the maximum allowed size of a dominating set plus the length of the reconfiguration sequence, already on 5-degenerate graphs. On the positive side, we show that CDS-R parameterized by k is fixed-parameter tractable, and in fact admits a polynomial kernel on planar graphs

Complexity of Coloring Reconfiguration under Recolorability Constraints

For an integer k ge 1, k-coloring reconfiguration is one of the most well-studied reconfiguration problems, defined as follows: In the problem, we are given two (vertex-)colorings of a graph using k colors, and asked to transform one into the other by recoloring only one vertex at a time, while at all times maintaining a proper coloring. The problem is known to be PSPACE-complete if k ge 4, and solvable for any graph in polynomial time if k le 3. In this paper, we introduce a recolorability constraint on the k colors, which forbids some pairs of colors to be recolored directly. The recolorability constraint is given in terms of an undirected graph R such that each node in R corresponds to a color and each edge in R represents a pair of colors that can be recolored directly. We study the hardness of the problem based on the structure of recolorability constraints R. More specifically, we prove that the problem is PSPACE-complete if R is of maximum degree at least four, or has a connected component containing more than one cycle

List Colouring Trees in Logarithmic Space

We show that List Colouring can be solved on n-vertex trees by a deterministic Turing machine using O(log n) bits on the worktape. Given an n-vertex graph G = (V,E) and a list L(v) ⊆ {1, . . . , n} of available colours for each v ∈ V , a list colouring for G is a proper colouring c such that c(v) ∈ L(v) for all v

Order-Related Problems Parameterized by Width

In the main body of this thesis, we study two different order theoretic problems. The first problem, called Completion of an Ordering, asks to extend a given finite partial order to a complete linear order while respecting some weight constraints. The second problem is an order reconfiguration problem under width constraints. While the Completion of an Ordering problem is NP-complete, we show that it lies in FPT when parameterized by the interval width of ρ. This ordering problem can be used to model several ordering problems stemming from diverse application areas, such as graph drawing, computational social choice, and computer memory management. Each application yields a special partial order ρ. We also relate the interval width of ρ to parameterizations for these problems that have been studied earlier in the context of these applications, sometimes improving on parameterized algorithms that have been developed for these parameterizations before. This approach also gives some practical sub-exponential time algorithms for ordering problems. In our second main result, we combine our parameterized approach with the paradigm of solution diversity. The idea of solution diversity is that instead of aiming at the development of algorithms that output a single optimal solution, the goal is to investigate algorithms that output a small set of sufficiently good solutions that are sufficiently diverse from one another. In this way, the user has the opportunity to choose the solution that is most appropriate to the context at hand. It also displays the richness of the solution space. There, we show that the considered diversity version of the Completion of an Ordering problem is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to natural paramaters that capture the notion of diversity and the notion of sufficiently good solutions. We apply this algorithm in the study of the Kemeny Rank Aggregation class of problems, a well-studied class of problems lying in the intersection of order theory and social choice theory. Up to this point, we have been looking at problems where the goal is to find an optimal solution or a diverse set of good solutions. In the last part, we shift our focus from finding solutions to studying the solution space of a problem. There we consider the following order reconfiguration problem: Given a graph G together with linear orders τ and τ ′ of the vertices of G, can one transform τ into τ ′ by a sequence of swaps of adjacent elements in such a way that at each time step the resulting linear order has cutwidth (pathwidth) at most w? We show that this problem always has an affirmative answer when the input linear orders τ and τ ′ have cutwidth (pathwidth) at most w/2. Using this result, we establish a connection between two apparently unrelated problems: the reachability problem for two-letter string rewriting systems and the graph isomorphism problem for graphs of bounded cutwidth. This opens an avenue for the study of the famous graph isomorphism problem using techniques from term rewriting theory. In addition to the main part of this work, we present results on two unrelated problems, namely on the Steiner Tree problem and on the Intersection Non-emptiness problem from automata theory.Doktorgradsavhandlin

Algorithms for Coloring Reconfiguration Under Recolorability Constraints

Coloring reconfiguration is one of the most well-studied reconfiguration problems. In the problem, we are given two (vertex-)colorings of a graph using at most k colors, and asked to determine whether there exists a transformation between them by recoloring only a single vertex at a time, while maintaining a k-coloring throughout. It is known that this problem is solvable in linear time for any graph if k = 4. In this paper, we further investigate the problem from the viewpoint of recolorability constraints, which forbid some pairs of colors to be recolored directly. More specifically, the recolorability constraint is given in terms of an undirected graph R such that each node in R corresponds to a color, and each edge in R represents a pair of colors that can be recolored directly. In this paper, we give a linear-time algorithm to solve the problem under such a recolorability constraint if R is of maximum degree at most two. In addition, we show that the minimum number of recoloring steps required for a desired transformation can be computed in linear time for a yes-instance. We note that our results generalize the known positive ones for coloring reconfiguration

Reconfiguration on sparse graphs

A vertex-subset graph problem Q defines which subsets of the vertices of an input graph are feasible solutions. A reconfiguration variant of a vertex-subset problem asks, given two feasible solutions S and T of size k, whether it is possible to transform S into T by a sequence of vertex additions and deletions such that each intermediate set is also a feasible solution of size bounded by k. We study reconfiguration variants of two classical vertex-subset problems, namely Independent Set and Dominating Set. We denote the former by ISR and the latter by DSR. Both ISR and DSR are PSPACE-complete on graphs of bounded bandwidth and W[1]-hard parameterized by k on general graphs. We show that ISR is fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by k when the input graph is of bounded degeneracy or nowhere-dense. As a corollary, we answer positively an open question concerning the parameterized complexity of the problem on graphs of bounded treewidth. Moreover, our techniques generalize recent results showing that ISR is fixed-parameter tractable on planar graphs and graphs of bounded degree. For DSR, we show the problem fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by k when the input graph does not contain large bicliques, a class of graphs which includes graphs of bounded degeneracy and nowhere-dense graphs