,
Naonori Kakimura,
Naoyuki Kamiyama,
Yusuke Kobayashi,
Yoshio Okamoto
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
Motivated by adjacency in perfect matching polytopes, we study the shortest reconfiguration problem of perfect matchings via alternating cycles. Namely, we want to find a shortest sequence of perfect matchings which transforms one given perfect matching to another given perfect matching such that the symmetric difference of each pair of consecutive perfect matchings is a single cycle. The problem is equivalent to the combinatorial shortest path problem in perfect matching polytopes. We prove that the problem is NP-hard even when a given graph is planar or bipartite, but it can be solved in polynomial time when the graph is outerplanar.
@InProceedings{ito_et_al:LIPIcs.ESA.2019.61,
author = {Ito, Takehiro and Kakimura, Naonori and Kamiyama, Naoyuki and Kobayashi, Yusuke and Okamoto, Yoshio},
title = {{Shortest Reconfiguration of Perfect Matchings via Alternating Cycles}},
booktitle = {27th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2019)},
pages = {61:1--61:15},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-124-5},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2019},
volume = {144},
editor = {Bender, Michael A. and Svensson, Ola and Herman, Grzegorz},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2019.61},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-111823},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2019.61},
annote = {Keywords: Matching, Combinatorial reconfiguration, Alternating cycles, Combinatorial shortest paths}
}