Finding small-width connected path decompositions in polynomial time.

A connected path decomposition of a simple graph G is a path decomposition (X 1 , ... , X l) such that the subgraph of G induced by X 1 ∪ ⋯ ∪ X i is connected for each i ∈ { 1 , ... , l }. The connected pathwidth of G is then the minimum width over all connected path decompositions of G. We prove that for each fixed k , the connected pathwidth of any input graph can be computed in polynomial-time. This answers an open question raised by Fedor V. Fomin during the GRASTA 2017 workshop, since connected pathwidth is equivalent to the connected (monotone) node search game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]