Fault tolerance for metric dimension and its variants

Hernando et al. (2008) introduced the fault-tolerant metric dimension $\text{ftdim}(G)$, which is the size of the smallest resolving set $S$ of a graph $G$ such that $S-\left\{s\right\}$ is also a resolving set of $G$ for every $s \in S$. They found an upper bound $\text{ftdim}(G) \le \dim(G) (1+2 \cdot 5^{\dim(G)-1})$, where $\dim(G)$ denotes the standard metric dimension of $G$. It was unknown whether there exists a family of graphs where $\text{ftdim}(G)$ grows exponentially in terms of $\dim(G)$, until recently when Knor et al. (2024) found a family with $\text{ftdim}(G) = \dim(G)+2^{\dim(G)-1}$ for any possible value of $\dim(G)$. We improve the upper bound on fault-tolerant metric dimension by showing that $\text{ftdim}(G) \le \dim(G)(1+3^{\dim(G)-1})$ for every connected graph $G$. Moreover, we find an infinite family of connected graphs $J_k$ such that $\dim(J_k) = k$ and $\text{ftdim}(J_k) \ge 3^{k-1}-k-1$ for each positive integer $k$. Together, our results show that $$\lim_{k \rightarrow \infty} \left( \max_{G: \text{ } \dim(G) = k} \frac{\log_3(\text{ftdim}(G))}{k} \right) = 1.$$ In addition, we consider the fault-tolerant edge metric dimension $\text{ftedim}(G)$ and bound it with respect to the edge metric dimension $\text{edim}(G)$, showing that $$\lim_{k \rightarrow \infty} \left( \max_{G: \text{ } \text{edim}(G) = k} \frac{\log_2(\text{ftedim}(G))}{k} \right) = 1.$$ We also obtain sharp extremal bounds on fault-tolerance for adjacency dimension and $k$-truncated metric dimension. Furthermore, we obtain sharp bounds for some other extremal problems about metric dimension and its variants. In particular, we prove an equivalence between an extremal problem about edge metric dimension and an open problem of Erd\H{o}s and Kleitman (1974) in extremal set theory.