Acyclic dominating partitions

Given a graph G=(V, E), let ${\mathcal{P}}$ be a partition of V. We say that ${\mathcal{P}}$ is dominating if, for each part P of ${\mathcal{P}}$, the set V\P is a dominating set in G (equivalently, if every vertex has a neighbor of a different part from its own). We say that ${\mathcal{P}}$ is acyclic if for any parts P, P′ of ${\mathcal{P}}$, the bipartite subgraph GP, P′] consisting of the edges between P and P′ in ${\mathcal{P}}$ contains no cycles. The acyclic dominating number ad(G) of G is the least number of parts in any partition of V that is both acyclic and dominating; and we shall denote by ad(d) the maximum over all graphs G of maximum degree at most d of ad(G). In this article, we prove that ad(3)=2, which establishes a conjecture of P. Boiron, É. Sopena, and L. Vignal, DIMACS/DIMATIA Conference “Contemporary Trends in Discrete Mathematics”, 1997, pp. 1–10. For general d, we prove the upper bound ad(d)=O(dlnd) and a lower bound of ad(d)=Ω(d). © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 64: 292–311, 2010