English

Fully-dynamic Planarity Testing in Polylogarithmic Time

Data Structures and Algorithms 2019-12-11 v2

Abstract

Given a dynamic graph subject to insertions and deletions of edges, a natural question is whether the graph presently admits a planar embedding. We give a deterministic fully-dynamic algorithm for general graphs, running in amortized O(log3n)O(\log^3 n) time per edge insertion or deletion, that maintains a bit indicating whether or not the graph is presently planar. This is an exponential improvement over the previous best algorithm [Eppstein, Galil, Italiano, Spencer, 1996] which spends amortized O(n)O(\sqrt{n}) time per update.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.03449,
  title  = {Fully-dynamic Planarity Testing in Polylogarithmic Time},
  author = {Jacob Holm and Eva Rotenberg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.03449},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Updated version of paper submitted to STOC'20. This version features a complete rewrite of section 4.4 (do-separation-flips). The new version fixes an overlooked case in the previous version (the two fundamental cycles we find do not necessarily share an edge) and contains a detailed case-by-case proof of correctness

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:09:42.933Z