Dominating Induced Matchings for P7-Free Graphs in Linear Time

Let $G$ be a finite undirected graph with edge set $E$. An edge set $E' \subseteq E$ is an {\em induced matching} in $G$ if the pairwise distance of the edges of $E'$ in $G$ is at least two; $E'$ is {\em dominating} in $G$ if every edge $e \in E \setminus E'$ intersects some edge in $E'$. The \emph{Dominating Induced Matching Problem} (\emph{DIM}, for short) asks for the existence of an induced matching $E'$ which is also dominating in $G$; this problem is also known as the \emph{Efficient Edge Domination} Problem. The DIM problem is related to parallel resource allocation problems, encoding theory and network routing. It is \NP-complete even for very restricted graph classes such as planar bipartite graphs with maximum degree three. However, its complexity was open for $P_k$-free graphs for any $k \ge 5$; $P_k$ denotes a chordless path with $k$ vertices and $k-1$ edges. We show in this paper that the weighted DIM problem is solvable in linear time for $P_7$-free graphs in a robust way.