Dynamic Planar Embedding Is in DynFO

Planar Embedding is a drawing of a graph on the plane such that the edges do not intersect each other except at the vertices. We know that testing the planarity of a graph and computing its embedding (if it exists), can efficiently be computed, both sequentially [John E. Hopcroft and Robert Endre Tarjan, 1974] and in parallel [Vijaya Ramachandran and John H. Reif, 1994], when the entire graph is presented as input. In the dynamic setting, the input graph changes one edge at a time through insertion and deletions and planarity testing/embedding has to be updated after every change. By storing auxilliary information we can improve the complexity of dynamic planarity testing/embedding over the obvious recomputation from scratch. In the sequential dynamic setting, there has been a series of works [David Eppstein et al., 1996; Giuseppe F. Italiano et al., 1993; Jacob Holm et al., 2018; Jacob Holm and Eva Rotenberg, 2020], culminating in the breakthrough result of polylog(n) sequential time (amortized) planarity testing algorithm of Holm and Rotenberg [Jacob Holm and Eva Rotenberg, 2020]. In this paper we study planar embedding through the lens of DynFO, a parallel dynamic complexity class introduced by Patnaik et al [Sushant Patnaik and Neil Immerman, 1997] (also [Guozhu Dong et al., 1995]). We show that it is possible to dynamically maintain whether an edge can be inserted to a planar graph without causing non-planarity in DynFO. We extend this to show how to maintain an embedding of a planar graph under both edge insertions and deletions, while rejecting edge insertions that violate planarity. Our main idea is to maintain embeddings of only the triconnected components and a special two-colouring of separating pairs that enables us to side-step cascading flips when embedding of a biconnected planar graph changes, a major issue for sequential dynamic algorithms [Jacob Holm and Eva Rotenberg, 2020; Jacob Holm and Eva Rotenberg, 2020].