On the complexity of metric dimension

  • Authors:

  • Josep Díaz;Olli Pottonen;Maria Serna;Erik Jan van Leeuwen

  • Affiliations:

  • Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informatics, UPC, Barcelona, Spain;Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informatics, UPC, Barcelona, Spain;Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informatics, UPC, Barcelona, Spain;Dept. Computer, Control, Managm. Eng., Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

  • Venue:
  • ESA'12 Proceedings of the 20th Annual European conference on Algorithms
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The metric dimension of a graph G is the size of a smallest subset L⊆V(G) such that for any x,y∈V(G) there is a z∈L such that the graph distance between x and z differs from the graph distance between y and z. Even though this notion has been part of the literature for almost 40 years, the computational complexity of determining the metric dimension of a graph is still very unclear. Essentially, we only know the problem to be NP-hard for general graphs, to be polynomial-time solvable on trees, and to have a logn-approximation algorithm for general graphs. In this paper, we show tight complexity boundaries for the Metric Dimension problem. We achieve this by giving two complementary results. First, we show that the Metric Dimension problem on bounded-degree planar graphs is NP-complete. Then, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for determining the metric dimension of outerplanar graphs.