Mim-Width III. Graph Powers and Generalized Distance Domination Problems

Abstract

We generalize the family of problems and locally checkable vertex partition problems to their distance versions, which naturally captures well-known problems such as Distance-r Dominating Set and Distance-r Independent Set. We show that these distance problems are in XP parameterized by the structural parameter mim-width, and hence polynomial-time solvable on graph classes where mim-width is bounded and quickly computable, such as k-trapezoid graphs, Dilworth k-graphs, (circular) permutation graphs, interval graphs and their complements, convex graphs and their complements, k-polygon graphs, circular arc graphs, complements of d-degenerate graphs, and H-graphs if given an H-representation. We obtain these results by showing that taking any power of a graph never increases its mim-width by more than a factor of two. To supplement these findings, we show that many classes of problems are -hard parameterized by mim-width + solution size.

We show that powers of graphs of tree-width or path-width w and powers of graphs of clique-width w have mim-width at most w. These results provide new classes of bounded mim-width. We prove a slight strengthening of the first statement which implies that, surprisingly, Leaf Power graphs which are of importance in the field of phylogenetic studies have mim-width at most 1.