Clustered Planarity = Flat Clustered Planarity

The complexity of deciding whether a clustered graph admits a clustered planar drawing is a long-standing open problem in the graph drawing research area. Several research efforts focus on a restricted version of this problem where the hierarchy of the clusters is "flat", i.e., no cluster different from the root contains other clusters. We prove that this restricted problem, that we call Flat Clustered Planarity, retains the same complexity of the general Clustered Planarity problem, where the clusters are allowed to form arbitrary hierarchies. We strengthen this result by showing that Flat Clustered Planarity is polynomial-time equivalent to Independent Flat Clustered Planarity, where each cluster induces an independent set. We discuss the consequences of these results.