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Ferry Cover with Connectivity Constraints

Authors: Niranjan Balachandran, Ankita Dargad, Urban Larsson, Neeldhara Misra, and Umesh Shankar

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 366, 13th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2026)


Abstract
The classical Ferry Cover problem asks for the minimum boat capacity needed to transport all vertices of a graph across a river such that no edge remains on either bank at any time - a requirement that the banks induce stable (independent) sets. We study a natural generalization in which the banks must satisfy an arbitrary graph property. For hereditary properties such as acyclicity or planarity, we show that the structural characterization of small-boat and large-boat graphs established by Csorba, Hurkens, and Woeginger extends directly. We then turn to the connected-bank variant, where the property of interest - connectedness - is not hereditary: both banks must induce connected subgraphs throughout the transfer. We provide a complete characterization of graphs that can be transferred with a boat of size one (boat-1 graphs): a connected graph is boat-1 if and only if its block-cut tree is a path. This characterization yields a linear-time recognition algorithm. As a consequence, we show that every biconnected graph is boat-1, since such graphs admit an st-numbering. We also develop an efficient algorithm for determining the boat number of trees. Our work opens new directions for river-crossing problems under non-hereditary bank constraints.

Cite as

Niranjan Balachandran, Ankita Dargad, Urban Larsson, Neeldhara Misra, and Umesh Shankar. Ferry Cover with Connectivity Constraints. In 13th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 366, pp. 6:1-6:19, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)


Copy BibTex To Clipboard

@InProceedings{balachandran_et_al:LIPIcs.FUN.2026.6,
  author =	{Balachandran, Niranjan and Dargad, Ankita and Larsson, Urban and Misra, Neeldhara and Shankar, Umesh},
  title =	{{Ferry Cover with Connectivity Constraints}},
  booktitle =	{13th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2026)},
  pages =	{6:1--6:19},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-417-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{366},
  editor =	{Iacono, John},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FUN.2026.6},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-257253},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.FUN.2026.6},
  annote =	{Keywords: ferry cover, river crossing, block-cut tree, st-numbering, hereditary graph property, connectivity}
}
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