English

A dual view of Roman Domination: The 2-limited packing problem

Combinatorics 2026-02-11 v2

Abstract

We consider the 2-limited packing problem: for a graph G=(V,E)G=(V,E) one seeks to find a maximum cardinality subset BVB\subseteq V, such that, for all vVv\in V, the closed neighbourhood of vv contains at most two vertices in BB. We compare this packing problem to the well-known Roman domination problem by pointing out some similarities and differences in the behaviour of the optimal solutions of both problems and show that these two problems are weakly dual. We show that for trees, the two problems are strongly dual, letting us solve the Roman domination problem by computing an optimal solution to the 2-limited packing problem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.19748,
  title  = {A dual view of Roman Domination: The 2-limited packing problem},
  author = {Oliver Bachtler and Sven O. Krumke and Helena Weiß},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.19748},
  year   = {2026}
}