In 1986 Robertson and Seymour proved a generalization of the seminal result of Erdős and Pósa on the duality of packing and covering cycles: A graph has the Erdős-Pósa property for minors if and only if it is planar. In particular, for every non-planar graph H they gave examples showing that the Erdős-Pósa property does not hold for H. Recently, Liu confirmed a conjecture of Thomas and showed that every graph has the half-integral Erdős-Pósa property for minors. Liu’s proof is non-constructive and to this date, with the exception of a small number of examples, no constructive proof is known. In this paper, we initiate the delineation of the half-integrality of the Erdős-Pósa property for minors. We conjecture that for every graph H, there exists a unique (up to a suitable equivalence relation on graph parameters) graph parameter EP_H such that H has the Erdős-Pósa property in a minor-closed graph class 𝒢 if and only if sup{EP_H(G) ∣ G ∈ 𝒢} is finite. We prove this conjecture for the class ℋ of Kuratowski-connected shallow-vortex minors by showing that, for every non-planar H ∈ ℋ, the parameter EP_H(G) is precisely the maximum order of a Robertson-Seymour counterexample to the Erdős-Pósa property of H which can be found as a minor in G. Our results are constructive and imply, for the first time, parameterized algorithms that find either a packing, or a cover, or one of the Robertson-Seymour counterexamples, certifying the existence of a half-integral packing for the graphs in ℋ.
@InProceedings{paul_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.114, author = {Paul, Christophe and Protopapas, Evangelos and Thilikos, Dimitrios M. and Wiederrecht, Sebastian}, title = {{Delineating Half-Integrality of the Erd\H{o}s-P\'{o}sa Property for Minors: The Case of Surfaces}}, booktitle = {51st International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2024)}, pages = {114:1--114:19}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-322-5}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2024}, volume = {297}, editor = {Bringmann, Karl and Grohe, Martin and Puppis, Gabriele and Svensson, Ola}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.114}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-202576}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.114}, annote = {Keywords: Erd\H{o}s-P\'{o}sa property, Erd\H{o}s-P\'{o}sa pair, Graph parameters, Graph minors, Universal obstruction, Surface containment} }
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