Computing Role Assignments of Proper Interval Graphs in Polynomial Time

A homomorphism from a graph G to a graph R is locally surjective if its restriction to the neighborhood of each vertex of G is surjective. Such a homomorphism is also called an R-role assignment of G. Role assignments have applications in distributed computing, social network theory, and topological graph theory. The Role Assignment problem has as input a pair of graphs (G, R) and asks whether G has an R-role assignment. This problem is NP-complete already on input pairs (G, R) where R is a path on three vertices. So far, the only known non-trivial tractable case consists of input pairs (G, R) where G is a tree. We present a polynomial time algorithm that solves Role Assignment on all input pairs (G, R) where G is a proper interval graph. Thus we identify the first graph class other than trees on which the problem is tractable. As a complementary result, we show that the problem is Graph Isomorphism-hard on chordal graphs, a superclass of proper interval graphs and trees.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IWOCA
• Authors: Pinar Heggernes, Pim van 't Hof, Daniël Paulusma
• Keywords: Algorithms, Input Pairs, IWOCA 2010, Proper Interval Graphs, R-role Assignment