English

Edge exploration of temporal graphs

Computational Complexity 2021-11-18 v3 Combinatorics

Abstract

We introduce a natural temporal analogue of Eulerian circuits and prove that, in contrast with the static case, it is NP-hard to determine whether a given temporal graph is temporally Eulerian even if strong restrictions are placed on the structure of the underlying graph and each edge is active at only three times. However, we do obtain an FPT-algorithm with respect to a new parameter called interval-membership-width which restricts the times assigned to different edges; we believe that this parameter will be of independent interest for other temporal graph problems. Our techniques also allow us to resolve two open question of Akrida, Mertzios and Spirakis [CIAC 2019] concerning a related problem of exploring temporal stars. Furthermore, we introduce a vertex-variant of interval-membership-width (which can be arbitrarily larger than its edge-counterpart) and use it to obtain an FPT-time algorithm for a natural vertex-exploration problem that remains hard even when interval-membership-width is bounded.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.05387,
  title  = {Edge exploration of temporal graphs},
  author = {Benjamin Merlin Bumpus and Kitty Meeks},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.05387},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Extended abstract of this paper appeared in IWOCA 2021: Combinatorial Algorithms pp 107-121 (doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79987-8_8 )

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