Fully-Dynamic α + 2 Arboricity Decompositions and Implicit Colouring

Abstract

The arboricity α of a graph is the smallest number of forests necessary to cover its edges, and an arboricity decomposition of a graph is a decomposition of its edges into forests. The best near-linear time algorithm for arboricity decomposition guarantees at most α +2 forests if the graph has arboricity α (Blumenstock and Fischer [Markus Blumenstock and Frank Fischer, 2020]). 
In this paper, we study arboricity decomposition for dynamic graphs, that is, graphs that are subject to insertions and deletions of edges. We give an algorithm that, provided the arboricity of the dynamic graph never exceeds α, maintains an α+2 arboricity decomposition of the graph in poly(log n,α) update time, thus matching the number of forests currently obtainable in near-linear time for static (non-changing) graphs.
Our construction goes via dynamic bounded out-degree orientations, and we present a fully-dynamic algorithm that explicitly orients the edges of the dynamic graph, such that no vertex has an out-degree exceeding ⌊ (1+ε)α ⌋ + 2. Our algorithm is deterministic and has a worst-case update time of O(ε^{-6}α² log³ n). The state-of-the-art explicit, deterministic, worst-case algorithm for bounded out-degree orientations maintains a β⋅ α + log_β n out-orientation in O(β²α²+βαlog_β n) time [Tsvi Kopelowitz et al., 2014]. 
As a consequence, we get an algorithm that maintains an implicit vertex colouring with 4⋅ 2^α colours, in amortised poly-log n update time, and with O(α log n) worst-case query time. Thus, at the expense of log n-factors in the update time, we improve on the number of colours from 2^O(α) to O(2^α) compared to the state-of-the-art for implicit dynamic colouring [Monika Henzinger et al., 2020].