Edge-decomposition into Two Triangular Forests is NP-complete
Abstract
Let be a graph class that is closed under topological minors and 1-sums, has decidable membership, contains a triangle, and is not the class of all graphs. Recently, Lee, Liu, and Tsai [ICALP 2026] showed that the edge-decomposition problem into elements of is NP-hard. In particular, their general hardness reduction covers a long-standing problem on outerthickness (when is the class of outerplanar graphs). On the other hand, it is well known that decomposing a graph into forests is polynomial-time solvable, as implied by work of Edmonds [J. Res. Natl. Bur. Stand. B. 1965]. In this paper, we take a first step toward determining the complexity of edge-decomposition problems into just two graphs (the case ). We consider the simplest possible graph class satisfying the criteria above: the triangular forests, that is, graphs in which every 2-connected component is a triangle. We prove that determining whether a graph can be edge-decomposed into two triangular forests is NP-complete.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.13999,
title = {Edge-decomposition into Two Triangular Forests is NP-complete},
author = {Beniamin Bibrowski and Tomáš Masařík},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.13999},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
13 pages, 8 figures