Log-Space Algorithms for Paths and Matchings in k-Trees

  • Authors:

  • Bireswar Das;Samir Datta;Prajakta Nimbhorkar

  • Affiliations:

  • Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India;Chennai Mathematical Institute, Chennai, India;Chennai Mathematical Institute, Chennai, India

  • Venue:
  • Theory of Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Reachability and shortest path problems are NL-complete for general graphs. They are known to be in L for graphs of tree-width 2 (Jakoby and Tantau in Proceedings of FSTTCS'07: The 27th Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, pp. 216---227, 2007). In this paper, we improve these bounds for k-trees, where k is a constant. In particular, the main results of our paper are log-space algorithms for reachability in directed k-trees, and for computation of shortest and longest paths in directed acyclic k-trees.Besides the path problems mentioned above, we also consider the problem of deciding whether a k-tree has a perfect matching (decision version), and if so, finding a perfect matching (search version), and prove that these two problems are L-complete. These problems are known to be in P and in RNC for general graphs, and in SPL for planar bipartite graphs, as shown in Datta et al. (Theory Comput. Syst. 47:737---757, 2010).Our results settle the complexity of these problems for the class of k-trees. The results are also applicable for bounded tree-width graphs, when a tree-decomposition is given as input. The technique central to our algorithms is a careful implementation of the divide-and-conquer approach in log-space, along with some ideas from Jakoby and Tantau (Proceedings of FSTTCS'07: The 27th Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, pp. 216---227, 2007) and Limaye et al. (Theory Comput. Syst. 46(3):499---522, 2010).