Exploring Word-Representable Temporal Graphs

TL;DR

This paper extends word-representable graphs to temporal graphs, studying exploration schedules and providing bounds on exploration time based on graph properties, with proofs of asymptotic optimality.

Contribution

It introduces a novel generalization of word-representable graphs to temporal graphs and analyzes exploration strategies with tight bounds.

Findings

Exploration in connected temporal graphs can be done in 2δn timesteps.

Full exploration is possible in 2dn timesteps for certain word-encoded graphs.

The bounds on exploration time are asymptotically optimal for graphs with diameter d.

Abstract

Word-representable graphs are a subset of graphs that may be represented by a word $w$ over an alphabet composed of the vertices in the graph. In such graphs, an edge exists if and only if the occurrences of the corresponding vertices alternate in the word $w$. We generalise this notion to temporal graphs, constructing timesteps by partitioning the word into factors (contiguous subwords) such that no factor contains more than one copy of any given symbol. With this definition, we study the problem of \emph{exploration}, asking for the fastest schedule such that a given agent may explore all $n$ vertices of the graph. We show that if the corresponding temporal graph is connected in every timestep, we may explore the graph in $2\delta n$ timesteps, where $\delta$ is the lowest degree of any vertex in the graph. In general, we show that, for any temporal graph represented by a word of length at least $n(2dn + d)$, with a connected underlying graph, the full graph can be explored in $2 d n$ timesteps, where $d$ is the diameter of the graph. We show this is asymptotically optimal by providing a class of graphs of diameter $d$ requiring $\Omega(d n)$ timesteps to explore, for any $d \in [1, n]$.