,
Takehiro Ito
,
Yusuke Kobayashi
,
Haruka Mizuta,
Paul Ouvrard,
Akira Suzuki
,
Kunihiro Wasa
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
Let G be a graph and T₁,T₂ be two spanning trees of G. We say that T₁ can be transformed into T₂ via an edge flip if there exist two edges e ∈ T₁ and f in T₂ such that T₂ = (T₁⧵e) ∪ f. Since spanning trees form a matroid, one can indeed transform a spanning tree into any other via a sequence of edge flips, as observed in [Takehiro Ito et al., 2011]. We investigate the problem of determining, given two spanning trees T₁,T₂ with an additional property Π, if there exists an edge flip transformation from T₁ to T₂ keeping property Π all along. First we show that determining if there exists a transformation from T₁ to T₂ such that all the trees of the sequence have at most k (for any fixed k ≥ 3) leaves is PSPACE-complete. We then prove that determining if there exists a transformation from T₁ to T₂ such that all the trees of the sequence have at least k leaves (where k is part of the input) is PSPACE-complete even restricted to split, bipartite or planar graphs. We complete this result by showing that the problem becomes polynomial for cographs, interval graphs and when k = n-2.
@InProceedings{bousquet_et_al:LIPIcs.ESA.2020.24,
author = {Bousquet, Nicolas and Ito, Takehiro and Kobayashi, Yusuke and Mizuta, Haruka and Ouvrard, Paul and Suzuki, Akira and Wasa, Kunihiro},
title = {{Reconfiguration of Spanning Trees with Many or Few Leaves}},
booktitle = {28th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2020)},
pages = {24:1--24:15},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-162-7},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2020},
volume = {173},
editor = {Grandoni, Fabrizio and Herman, Grzegorz and Sanders, Peter},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2020.24},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-128909},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2020.24},
annote = {Keywords: combinatorial reconfiguration, spanning trees, PSPACE, polynomial-time algorithms}
}