English

Separating path systems in trees

Combinatorics 2023-06-02 v1

Abstract

For a graph GG, an edge-separating (resp. vertex-separating) path system of GG is a family of paths in GG such that for any pair of edges e1,e2e_1, e_2 (resp. pair of vertices v1,v2v_1, v_2) of GG there is at least one path in the family that contains one of e1e_1 and e2e_2 (resp. v1v_1 and v2v_2) but not the other. We determine the size of a minimum edge-separating path system of an arbitrary tree TT as a function of its number of leaves and degree-two vertices. We obtain bounds for the size of a minimal vertex-separating path system for trees, which we show to be tight in many cases. We obtain similar results for a variation of the definition, where we require the path system to separate edges and vertices simultaneously. Finally, we investigate the size of a minimal vertex-separating path system in Erd\H{o}s--R\'enyi random graphs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.00843,
  title  = {Separating path systems in trees},
  author = {Francisco Arrepol and Patricio Asenjo and Raúl Astete and Víctor Cartes and Anahí Gajardo and Valeria Henríquez and Catalina Opazo and Nicolás Sanhueza-Matamala and Christopher Thraves Caro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.00843},
  year   = {2023}
}