Structural Parameterizations of the Mixed Chinese Postman Problem

TL;DR

This paper investigates the computational complexity of the unweighted Mixed Chinese Postman Problem (MCPP) under various graph parameters, revealing a surprising W[1]-hardness with respect to treewidth but fixed-parameter tractability with respect to tree-depth.

Contribution

It establishes the W[1]-hardness of MCPP parameterized by treewidth and pathwidth, and the fixed-parameter tractability by tree-depth, providing a complexity dichotomy for the problem.

Findings

MCPP is W[1]-hard when parameterized by treewidth.

MCPP is W[1]-hard when parameterized by pathwidth.

MCPP is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by tree-depth.

Abstract

In the Mixed Chinese Postman Problem (MCPP), given a weighted mixed graph $G$ ($G$ may have both edges and arcs), our aim is to find a minimum weight closed walk traversing each edge and arc at least once. The MCPP parameterized by the number of edges in $G$ or the number of arcs in $G$ is fixed-parameter tractable as proved by van Bevern {\em et al.} (in press) and Gutin, Jones and Sheng (ESA 2014), respectively. In this paper, we consider the unweighted version of MCPP. Solving an open question of van Bevern {\em et al.} (in press), we show that somewhat unexpectedly MCPP parameterized by the (undirected) treewidth of $G$ is W[1]-hard. In fact, we prove that even the MCPP parameterized by the pathwidth of $G$ is W[1]-hard. On the positive side, we show that the unweighted version of MCPP parameterized by tree-depth is fixed-parameter tractable. We are unaware of any natural graph parameters between pathwidth and tree-depth and so our results provide a dichotomy of the complexity of MCPP. Furthermore, we believe that MCPP is the first problem known to be W[1]-hard with respect to treewidth but FPT with respect to tree-depth.