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A t-spanner of a graph G is a spanning subgraph S in which the distance between every pair of vertices is at most t times their distance in G. If S is required to be a tree then S is called a tree t-spanner of G. In 1998, Fekete and Kremer showed that on unweighted planar graphs deciding whether G admits a tree t-spanner is polynomial time solvable for t⩽3 and is NP-complete when t is part of the input. They also left as an open problem if the problem is polynomial time solvable for every fixed t⩾4. In this work we resolve the open question of Fekete and Kremer by proving much more general results:•The problem of finding a t-spanner of treewidth at most k in a given planar graph G is fixed parameter tractable parameterized by k and t. Moreover, for every fixed t and k, the running time of our algorithm is linear.•Our technique allows to extend the result from planar graphs to much more general classes of graphs. An apex graph is a graph that can be made planar by the removal of a single vertex. We prove that the problem of finding a t-spanner of treewidth k is fixed parameter tractable on graphs that do not contain some fixed apex graph as a minor, i.e. on apex-minor-free graphs. The class of apex-minor-free graphs contains planar graphs and graphs of bounded genus.•Finally, we show that the tractability border of the t-spanner problem cannot be extended beyond the class of apex-minor-free graphs and in this sense our results are tight. In particular, for every t⩾4, the problem of finding a tree t-spanner is NP-complete on K6-minor-free graphs.

In this paper, the mutual exclusion scheduling problem is addressed. Given a simple and undirected graph G and an integer k, the problem is to find a minimum coloring of G such that each color is used at most k times. When restricted to interval graphs or related classes like circular-arc graphs and tolerance graphs, the problem has some applications in workforce planning. Unfortunately, the problem is shown to be NP-hard for interval graphs, even if k is a constant greater than or equal to four [H.L. Bodlaender and K. Jansen Restrictions of graph partition problems. Part I, Theoretical Computer Science 148(1995) pp. 93–109]. Several polynomial-time solvable cases significant in practice are exhibited here, for which we took care to devise simple and efficient algorithms (in particular linear-time and space algorithms). On the other hand, by reinforcing the NP-hardness result of Bodlaender and Jansen, we obtain a more precise cartography of the complexity of the problem for the classes of graphs studied.

For a given graph G=(V,E), the interval completion problem of G is to find an edge set F such that the supergraph H=(V,E∪F) of G is an interval graph and |F| is minimum. It has been shown that it is equivalent to the minimum sum cut problem, the profile minimization problem and a kind of graph searching problems. Furthermore, it has applications in computational biology, archaeology, and clone fingerprinting. In this paper, we show that it is NP-complete on split graphs and propose an efficient algorithm on primitive starlike graphs.

A potential maximal clique of a graph is a vertex set that induces a maximal clique in some minimal triangulation of that graph. It is known that if these objects can be listed in polynomial time for a class of graphs, the treewidth and the minimum fill-in are polynomially tractable for these graphs. We show here that the potential maximal cliques of a graph can be generated in polynomial time in the number of minimal separators of the graph. Thus, the treewidth and the minimum fill-in are polynomially tractable for all classes of graphs with a polynomial number of minimal separators.

Motivated by the desire to speed up dynamic programming algorithms for graphs of bounded treewidth, we initiate a study of the tradeoff between width and pathwidth of tree-decompositions. We therefore investigate the catwidth parameter catw(G) which is the minimum width of any tree-decomposition (T,X) of a graph G when the pathwidth pw(T) of the tree T is 1. The catwidth parameter lies between the treewidth and the pathwidth of the graph, tw(G)⩽catw(G)⩽pw(G), and just as treewidth relates to chordal graphs and pathwidth relates to interval graphs, catwidth relates to what we call catval graphs. We introduce the notion of an extended asteroidal triple (XAT) and characterize catval graphs as the XAT-free chordal graphs. We provide alternative characterizations of these graphs, show that there are graph classes for which the various parameters differ by an arbitrary amount, and consider algorithms for computing catwidth.

Extended abstract published in FAW 2010 (LNCS, Springer); In this paper we investigate the structural properties of $k$-path separable graphs, that are the graphs that can be separated by a set of $k$ shortest paths. We identify several graph families having such path separability, and we show that this property is closed under minor taking. In particular we establish a list of forbidden minors for $1$-path separable graphs.

We introduce a natural heuristic for approximating the treewidth of graphs. We prove that this heuristic gives a constant factor approximation for the treewidth of graphs with bounded asteroidal number. Using a different technique, we give a O(logk) approximation algorithm for the treewidth of arbitrary graphs, where k is the treewidth of the input graph.

Using the specific structure of the minimal separators of AT-free graphs, we give a polynomial time algorithm that computes a triangulation whose width is no more than twice the treewidth of the input graph.