Exploiting Automorphisms of Temporal Graphs for Fast Exploration and Rendezvous

Temporal graphs are dynamic graphs where the edge set can change in each time step, while the vertex set stays the same. Exploration of temporal graphs whose snapshot in each time step is a connected graph, called connected temporal graphs, has been widely studied. In this paper, we extend the concept of graph automorphisms from static graphs to temporal graphs and show for the first time that symmetries enable faster exploration: We prove that a connected temporal graph with n vertices and orbit number r (i.e., r is the number of automorphism orbits) can be explored in O(r n^{1+ε}) time steps, for any fixed ε > 0. For r = O(n^c) for constant c < 1, this is a significant improvement over the known tight worst-case bound of Θ(n²) time steps for arbitrary connected temporal graphs. We also give two lower bounds for temporal exploration, showing that Ω(n log n) time steps are required for some inputs with r = O(1) and that Ω(rn) time steps are required for some inputs for any r with 1 ≤ r ≤ n. Moreover, we show that the techniques we develop for fast exploration can be used to derive the following result for rendezvous: Two agents with different programs and without communication ability are placed by an adversary at arbitrary vertices and given full information about the connected temporal graph, except that they do not have consistent vertex labels. Then the two agents can meet at a common vertex after O(n^{1+ε}) time steps, for any constant ε > 0. For some connected temporal graphs with the orbit number being a constant, we also present a complementary lower bound of Ω(nlog n) time steps.