A k-page book embedding of a graph G draws the vertices of G on a line and the edges on k half-planes (called pages) bounded by this line, such that no two edges on the same page cross. We study the problem of determining whether G admits a k-page book embedding both when the linear order of the vertices is fixed, called Fixed-Order Book Thickness, or not fixed, called Book Thickness. Both problems are known to be NP-complete in general. We show that Fixed-Order Book Thickness and Book Thickness are fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by the vertex cover number of the graph and that Fixed-Order Book Thickness is fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by the pathwidth of the vertex order.
In a book embedding the vertices of a graph are placed on the "spine" of a "book" and the edges are assigned to "pages" so that edges on the same page do not cross. In the Partitioned 2-page Book Embedding problem egdes are partitioned into two sets E_1 and E_2, the pages are two, the edges of E_1 are assigned to page 1, and the edges of E_2 are assigned to page 2. The problem consists of checking if an ordering of the vertices exists along the spine so that the edges of each page do not cross. Hong and Nagamochi give an interesting and complex linear time algorithm for tackling Partitioned 2-…
We study $k$-page upward book embeddings ($k$UBEs) of $st$-graphs, that is, book embeddings of single-source single-sink directed acyclic graphs on $k$ pages with the additional requirement that the vertices of the graph appear in a topological ordering along the spine of the book. We show that testing whether a graph admits a $k$UBE is NP-complete for $k\geq 3$. A hardness result for this problem was previously known only for $k = 6$ [Heath and Pemmaraju, 1999]. Motivated by this negative result, we focus our attention on $k=2$. On the algorithmic side, we present polynomial-time algorithms f…
Given an embedded planar acyclic digraph G, we define the problem of "acyclic hamiltonian path completion with crossing minimization (Acyclic-HPCCM)" to be the problem of determining an hamiltonian path completion set of edges such that, when these edges are embedded on G, they create the smallest possible number of edge crossings and turn G to a hamiltonian digraph. Our results include: --We provide a characterization under which a triangulated st-digraph G is hamiltonian. --For an outerplanar triangulated st-digraph G, we define the st-polygon decomposition of G and, based on its properties,…
An embedding of a graph in a book consists of a linear order of its vertices along the spine of the book and of an assignment of its edges to the pages of the book, so that no two edges on the same page cross. The book thickness of a graph is the minimum number of pages over all its book embeddings. Accordingly, the book thickness of a class of graphs is the maximum book thickness over all its members. In this paper, we address a long-standing open problem regarding the exact book thickness of the class of planar graphs, which previously was known to be either three or four. We settle this pro…
In a book embedding, the vertices of a graph are placed on the spine of a book and the edges are assigned to pages, so that edges on the same page do not cross. In this paper, we prove that every $1$-planar graph (that is, a graph that can be drawn on the plane such that no edge is crossed more than once) admits an embedding in a book with constant number of pages. To the best of our knowledge, the best non-trivial previous upper-bound is $O(\sqrt{n})$, where $n$ is the number of vertices of the graph.
A $k$-stack layout (also called a $k$-page book embedding) of a graph consists of a total order of the vertices, and a partition of the edges into $k$ sets of non-crossing edges with respect to the vertex order. The stack number (book thickness, page number) of a graph is the minimum $k$ such that it admits a $k$-stack layout. A $k$-queue layout is defined similarly, except that no two edges in a single set may be nested. It was recently proved that graphs of various non-minor-closed classes are subgraphs of the strong product of a path and a graph with bounded treewidth. Motivated by this dec…
The $k$-leaf power graph $G$ of a tree $T$ is a graph whose vertices are the leaves of $T$ and whose edges connect pairs of leaves at unweighted distance at most~$k$ in $T$. Recognition of the $k$-leaf power graphs for $k \geq 7$ is still an open problem. In this paper, we provide two algorithms for this problem for sparse leaf power graphs. Our results shows that the problem of recognizing these graphs is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized both by $k$ and by the degeneracy of the given graph. To prove this, we first describe how to embed the leaf root of a leaf power graph into a pr…
We revisit the issue of low-distortion embedding of metric spaces into the line, and more generally, into the shortest path metric of trees, from the parameterized complexity perspective.Let $M=M(G)$ be the shortest path metric of an edge weighted graph $G=(V,E)$ on $n$ vertices. We describe algorithms for the problem of finding a low distortion non-contracting embedding of $M$ into line and tree metrics. We give an $O(nd^4(2d+1)^{2d})$ time algorithm that for an unweighted graph metric $M$ and integer $d$ either constructs an embedding of $M$ into the line with distortion at most $d$, or conc…
Hierarchical embedding constraints define a set of allowed cyclic orders for the edges incident to the vertices of a graph. These constraints are expressed in terms of FPQ-trees. FPQ-trees are a variant of PQ-trees that includes F-nodes in addition to P- and to Q-nodes. An F-node represents a permutation that is fixed, i.e., it cannot be reversed. Let $G$ be a graph such that every vertex of $G$ is equipped with a set of FPQ-trees encoding hierarchical embedding constraints for its incident edges. We study the problem of testing whether $G$ admits a planar embedding such that, for each vertex …
In the (parameterized) Ordered List Subgraph Embedding problem (p-OLSE) we are given two graphs $G$ and $H$, each with a linear order defined on its vertices, a function $L$ that associates with every vertex in $G$ a list of vertices in $H$, and a parameter $k$. The question is to decide if we can embed (one-to-one) a subgraph $S$ of $G$ of $k$ vertices into $H$ such that: (1) every vertex of $S$ is mapped to a vertex from its associated list, (2) the linear orders inherited by $S$ and its image under the embedding are respected, and (3) if there is an edge between two vertices in $S$ then the…
We study ordinal embedding relaxations in the realm of parameterized complexity. We prove the existence of a quadratic kernel for the {\sc Betweenness} problem parameterized above its tight lower bound, which is stated as follows. For a set $V$ of variables and set $\mathcal C$ of constraints "$v_i$ \mbox{is between} $v_j$ \mbox{and} $v_k$", decide whether there is a bijection from $V$ to the set $\{1,\ldots,|V|\}$ satisfying at least $|\mathcal C|/3 + κ$ of the constraints in $\mathcal C$. Our result solves an open problem attributed to Benny Chor in Niedermeier's monograph "Invitation to Fix…
The Metric Embedding problem takes as input two metric spaces $(X,D_X)$ and $(Y,D_Y)$, and a positive integer $d$. The objective is to determine whether there is an embedding $F:X \rightarrow Y$ such that $d_{F} \leq d$, where $d_{F}$ denotes the distortion of the map $F$. Such an embedding is called a distortion $d$ embedding. The bijective Metric Embedding problem is a special case of the Metric Embedding problem where $|X| = |Y|$. In parameterized complexity, the Metric Embedding problem, in full generality, is known to be W-hard and therefore, not expected to have an FPT algorithm. In this…
We give an analog of the Myhill-Nerode methods from formal language theory for hypergraphs and use it to derive the following results for two NP-hard hypergraph problems: * We provide an algorithm for testing whether a hypergraph has cutwidth at most k that runs in linear time for constant k. In terms of parameterized complexity theory, the problem is fixed-parameter linear parameterized by k. * We show that it is not expressible in monadic second-order logic whether a hypergraph has bounded (fractional, generalized) hypertree width. The proof leads us to conjecture that, in terms of parameter…
Fixed-parameter algorithms have been successfully applied to solve numerous difficult problems within acceptable time bounds on large inputs. However, most fixed-parameter algorithms are inherently \emph{sequential} and, thus, make no use of the parallel hardware present in modern computers. We show that parallel fixed-parameter algorithms do not only exist for numerous parameterized problems from the literature -- including vertex cover, packing problems, cluster editing, cutting vertices, finding embeddings, or finding matchings -- but that there are parallel algorithms working in \emph{cons…
