The treewidth is a structural parameter that measures the tree-likeness of a graph. Many algorithmic and combinatorial results are expressed in terms of the treewidth. In this paper, we study the treewidth of outer k-planar graphs, that is, graphs that admit a straight-line drawing where all the vertices lie on a circle, and every edge is crossed by at most k other edges. Wood and Telle [New York J. Math., 2007] showed that every outer k-planar graph has treewidth at most 3k + 11 using so-called planar decompositions, and later, Auer et al. [Algorithmica, 2016] proved that the treewidth of outer 1-planar graphs is at most 3, which is tight. In this paper, we improve the general upper bound to 1.5k + 2 and give a tight bound of 4 for k = 2. We also establish a lower bound: we show that, for every even k, there is an outer k-planar graph with treewidth k+2. Our new bound immediately implies a better bound on the cop number, which answers an open question of Durocher et al. [GD 2023] in the affirmative. Our treewidth bound relies on a new and simple triangulation method for outer k-planar graphs that yields few crossings with graph edges per edge of the triangulation. Our method also enables us to obtain a tight upper bound of k + 2 for the separation number of outer k-planar graphs, improving an upper bound of 2k + 3 by Chaplick et al. [GD 2017]. We also consider outer min-k-planar graphs, a generalization of outer k-planar graphs, where we achieve smaller improvements.
@InProceedings{firman_et_al:LIPIcs.GD.2024.14, author = {Firman, Oksana and Gutowski, Grzegorz and Kryven, Myroslav and Okada, Yuto and Wolff, Alexander}, title = {{Bounding the Treewidth of Outer k-Planar Graphs via Triangulations}}, booktitle = {32nd International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2024)}, pages = {14:1--14:17}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-343-0}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2024}, volume = {320}, editor = {Felsner, Stefan and Klein, Karsten}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.GD.2024.14}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-212988}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.GD.2024.14}, annote = {Keywords: treewidth, outerplanar graphs, outer k-planar graphs, outer min-k-planar graphs, cop number, separation number} }
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