Constrained ear decompositions in graphs and digraphs - Inria - Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique
Journal Articles Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science Year : 2019

Constrained ear decompositions in graphs and digraphs

Abstract

Ear decompositions of graphs are a standard concept related to several major problems in graph theory like the Traveling Salesman Problem. For example, the Hamiltonian Cycle Problem, which is notoriously N P-complete, is equivalent to deciding whether a given graph admits an ear decomposition in which all ears except one are trivial (i.e. of length 1). On the other hand, a famous result of Lovász states that deciding whether a graph admits an ear decomposition with all ears of odd length can be done in polynomial time. In this paper, we study the complexity of deciding whether a graph admits an ear decomposition with prescribed ear lengths. We prove that deciding whether a graph admits an ear decomposition with all ears of length at most is polynomial-time solvable for all fixed positive integer. On the other hand, deciding whether a graph admits an ear decomposition without ears of length in F is N P-complete for any finite set F of positive integers. We also prove that, for any k ≥ 2, deciding whether a graph admits an ear decomposition with all ears of length 0 mod k is N P-complete. We also consider the directed analogue to ear decomposition, which we call handle decomposition, and prove analogous results : deciding whether a digraph admits a handle decomposition with all handles of length at most is polynomial-time solvable for all positive integer ; deciding whether a digraph admits a handle decomposition without handles of length in F is N P-complete for any finite set F of positive integers (and minimizing the number of handles of length in F is not approximable up to n(1 −)); for any k ≥ 2, deciding whether a digraph admits a handle decomposition with all handles of length 0 mod k is N P-complete. Also, in contrast with the result of Lovász, we prove that deciding whether a digraph admits a handle decomposition with all handles of odd length is N P-complete. Finally, we conjecture that, for every set A of integers, deciding whether a digraph has a handle decomposition with all handles of length in A is N P-complete, unless there exists h ∈ N such that A = {1, · · · , h}.
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Dates and versions

hal-01798795 , version 1 (23-05-2018)
hal-01798795 , version 2 (13-02-2019)
hal-01798795 , version 3 (15-07-2019)

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Cite

Frédéric Havet, Nicolas Nisse. Constrained ear decompositions in graphs and digraphs. Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, 2019, vol. 21 no. 4, ⟨10.23638/DMTCS-21-4-3⟩. ⟨hal-01798795v3⟩
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