No Arabic abstract
A natural way of increasing our understanding of NP-complete graph problems is to restrict the input to a special graph class. Classes of $H$-free graphs, that is, graphs that do not contain some graph $H$ as an induced subgraph, have proven to be an ideal testbed for such a complexity study. However, if the forbidden graph $H$ contains a cycle or claw, then these problems often stay NP-complete. A recent complexity study on the $k$-Colouring problem shows that we may still obtain tractable results if we also bound the diameter of the $H$-free input graph. We continue this line of research by initiating a complexity study on the impact of bounding the diameter for a variety of classical vertex partitioning problems restricted to $H$-free graphs. We prove that bounding the diameter does not help for Independent Set, but leads to new tractable cases for problems closely related to 3-Colouring. That is, we show that Near-Bipartiteness, Independent Feedback Vertex Set, Independent Odd Cycle Transversal, Acyclic 3-Colouring and Star 3-Colouring are all polynomial-time solvable for chair-free graphs of bounded diameter. To obtain these results we exploit a new structural property of 3-colourable chair-free graphs.
We prove new complexity results for Feedback Vertex Set and Even Cycle Transversal on $H$-free graphs, that is, graphs that do not contain some fixed graph $H$ as an induced subgraph. In particular, we prove that both problems are polynomial-time solvable for $sP_3$-free graphs for every integer $sgeq 1$. Our results show that both problems exhibit the same behaviour on $H$-free graphs (subject to some open cases). This is in part explained by a new general algorithm we design for finding in a graph $G$ a largest induced subgraph whose blocks belong to some finite class ${cal C}$ of graphs. We also compare our results with the state-of-the-art results for the Odd Cycle Transversal problem, which is known to behave differently on $H$-free graphs.
For $kgeq 1$, a $k$-colouring $c$ of $G$ is a mapping from $V(G)$ to ${1,2,ldots,k}$ such that $c(u) eq c(v)$ for any two non-adjacent vertices $u$ and $v$. The $k$-Colouring problem is to decide if a graph $G$ has a $k$-colouring. For a family of graphs ${cal H}$, a graph $G$ is ${cal H}$-free if $G$ does not contain any graph from ${cal H}$ as an induced subgraph. Let $C_s$ be the $s$-vertex cycle. In previous work (MFCS 2019) we examined the effect of bounding the diameter on the complexity of $3$-Colouring for $(C_3,ldots,C_s)$-free graphs and $H$-free graphs where $H$ is some polyad. Here, we prove for certain small values of $s$ that $3$-Colouring is polynomial-time solvable for $C_s$-free graphs of diameter $2$ and $(C_4,C_s)$-free graphs of diameter $2$. In fact, our results hold for the more general problem List $3$-Colouring. We complement these results with some hardness result for diameter $4$.
Paths $P_1,ldots,P_k$ in a graph $G=(V,E)$ are mutually induced if any two distinct $P_i$ and $P_j$ have neither common vertices nor adjacent vertices (except perhaps their end-vertices). The Induced Disjoint Paths problem is to decide if a graph $G$ with $k$ pairs of specified vertices $(s_i,t_i)$ contains $k$ mutually induced paths $P_i$ such that each $P_i$ connects $s_i$ and $t_i$. This is a classical graph problem that is NP-complete even for $k=2$. We study it for AT-free graphs. Unlike its subclasses of permutation graphs and cocomparability graphs, the class of AT-free graphs has no geometric intersection model. However, by a new, structural analysis of the behaviour of Induced Disjoint Paths for AT-free graphs, we prove that it can be solved in polynomial time for AT-free graphs even when $k$ is part of the input. This is in contrast to the situation for other well-known graph classes, such as planar graphs, claw-free graphs, or more recently, (theta,wheel)-free graphs, for which such a result only holds if $k$ is fixed. As a consequence of our main result, the problem of deciding if a given AT-free graph contains a fixed graph $H$ as an induced topological minor admits a polynomial-time algorithm. In addition, we show that such an algorithm is essentially optimal by proving that the problem is W[1]-hard with parameter $|V_H|$, even on a subclass of AT-free graph, namely cobipartite graphs. We also show that the problems $k$-in-a-Path and $k$-in-a-Tree are polynomial-time solvable on AT-free graphs even if $k$ is part of the input. These problems are to test if a graph has an induced path or induced tree, respectively, spanning $k$ given vertices.
The well-known Disjoint Paths problem is to decide if a graph contains k pairwise disjoint paths, each connecting a different terminal pair from a set of k distinct pairs. We determine, with an exception of two cases, the complexity of the Disjoint Paths problem for $H$-free graphs. If $k$ is fixed, we obtain the $k$-Disjoint Paths problem, which is known to be polynomial-time solvable on the class of all graphs for every $k geq 1$. The latter does no longer hold if we need to connect vertices from terminal sets instead of terminal pairs. We completely classify the complexity of $k$-Disjoint Connected Subgraphs for $H$-free graphs, and give the same almost-complete classification for Disjoint Connected Subgraphs for $H$-free graphs as for Disjoint Paths.
We examine the effect of bounding the diameter for well-studied variants of the Colouring problem. A colouring is acyclic, star, or injective if any two colour classes induce a forest, star forest or disjoint union of vertices and edges, respectively. The corresponding decision problems are Acyclic Colouring, Star Colouring and Injective Colouring. The last problem is also known as $L(1,1)$-Labelling and we also consider the framework of $L(a,b)$-Labelling. We prove a number of (almost-)complete complexity classifications. In particular, we show that for graphs of diameter at most $d$, Acyclic $3$-Colouring is polynomial-time solvable if $dleq 2$ but NP-complete if $dgeq 4$, and Star $3$-Colouring is polynomial-time solvable if $dleq 3$ but NP-complete for $dgeq 8$. As far as we are aware, Star $3$-Colouring is the first problem that exhibits a complexity jump for some $dgeq 3$. Our third main result is that $L(1,2)$-Labelling is NP-complete for graphs of diameter $2$; we relate the latter problem to a special case of Hamiltonian Path.