Parameterized Edge Hamiltonicity Michael Lampis1;?, Kazuhisa Makino1, Valia Mitsou2;??, Yushi Uno3 1 Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Kyoto University mlampis,
[email protected] 2 CUNY Graduate Center
[email protected] 3 Department of Mathematics and Information Sciences, Graduate School of Science, Osaka Prefecture University
[email protected] Abstract. We study the parameterized complexity of the classical Edge Hamiltonian Path problem and give several fixed-parameter tractabil- ity results. First, we settle an open question of Demaine et al. by showing that Edge Hamiltonian Path is FPT parameterized by vertex cover, and that it also admits a cubic kernel. We then show fixed-parameter tractability even for a generalization of the problem to arbitrary hyper- graphs, parameterized by the size of a (supplied) hitting set. We also consider the problem parameterized by treewidth or clique-width. Sur- prisingly, we show that the problem is FPT for both of these standard parameters, in contrast to its vertex version, which is W-hard for clique- width. Our technique, which may be of independent interest, relies on a structural characterization of clique-width in terms of treewidth and complete bipartite subgraphs due to Gurski and Wanke. 1 Introduction The focus of this paper is the Edge Hamiltonian Path problem, which can be defined as follows: given an undirected graph G(V; E), does there exist a permutation of E such that every two consecutive edges in the permutation share an endpoint? This is a very well-known graph-theoretic problem, which corresponds to the restriction of (vertex) Hamiltonian Path to line graphs.