Excluded checkerboard colourable ribbon graph minors

Motivated by the Eulerian ribbon graph minors, in this paper we introduce the notion of checkerboard colourable minors for ribbon graphs and its dual: bipartite minors for ribbon graphs. Motivated by the bipartite minors of abstract graphs, another bipartite minors for ribbon graphs, i.e. the bipartite ribbon graph join minors are also introduced. Using these minors then we give excluded minor characterizations of the classes of checkerboard colourable ribbon graphs, bipartite ribbon graphs, plane checkerboard colourable ribbon graphs and plane bipartite ribbon graphs.     

Eulerian and even-face ribbon graph minors

In this paper, we introduce Eulerian and even-face ribbon graph minors. These minors preserve Eulerian and even-face properties of ribbon graphs, respectively. We then characterize Eulerian, even-face, plane Eulerian and plane even-face ribbon graphs using these minors.     

Some Recent Progress and Applications in Graph Minor Theory

In the core of the seminal Graph Minor Theory of Robertson and Seymour lies a powerful theorem capturing the ``rough' structure of graphs excluding a fixed minor. This result was used to prove Wagner's Conjecture that finite graphs are well-quasi-ordered under the graph minor relation. Recently, a number of beautiful results that use this structural result have appeared. Some of these along with some other recent advances on graph minors are surveyed. Research partly supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Grant number 16740044, by Sumitomo Foundation, by C & C Foundation and by Inoue Research Award for Young Scientists Supported in part by the Research Grant P1–0297 and by the CRC program On leave from: IMFM & FMF, Department of Mathematics, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia     

Obstruction sets for outer‐cylindrical graphs

A graph is outer‐cylindrical if it embeds in the sphere so that there are two distinct faces whose boundaries together contain all the vertices. The class of outer‐cylindrical graphs is closed under minors. We give the complete set of 38 minor‐minimal non‐outer‐cylindrical graphs, or equivalently, an excluded minor characterization of outer‐cylindrical graphs. We also give the obstruction sets under the related topological ordering and Y Δ‐ordering. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Graph Theory 38: 42–64, 2001     

Excluding a bipartite circle graph from line graphs

We prove that, for a fixed bipartite circle graph H, all line graphs with sufficiently large rank‐width (or clique‐width) must have a pivot‐minor isomorphic to H. To prove this, we introduce graphic delta‐matroids. Graphic delta‐matroids are minors of delta‐matroids of line graphs and they generalize graphic and cographic matroids. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 60: 183–203, 2009     

Unavoidable topological minors of infinite graphs

A graph G is loosely-c-connected, or ?-c-connected, if there exists a number d depending on G such that the deletion of fewer than c vertices from G leaves precisely one infinite component and a graph containing at most d vertices. In this paper, we give the structure of a set of ?-c-connected infinite graphs that form an unavoidable set among the topological minors of ?-c-connected infinite graphs. Corresponding results for minors and parallel minors are also obtained.     

A characterization of some graph classes using excluded minors

In this article we present a structural characterization of graphs without K ₅ and the octahedron as a minor. We introduce semiplanar graphs as arbitrary sums of planar graphs, and give their characterization in terms of excluded minors. Some other excluded minor theorems for 3-connected minors are shown. Communicated by Attila Pethő     

Hall‐Type Results for 3‐Connected Projective Graphs

Projective planar graphs can be characterized by a set of 35 excluded minors. However, these 35 are not equally important. A set of 3‐connected members of is excludable if there are only finitely many 3‐connected nonprojective planar graphs that do not contain any graph in as a minor. In this article, we show that there are precisely two minimal excludable sets, which have sizes 19 and 20, respectively.     

Four problems on graphs with excluded minors

The four problems we consider are the Chinese postman, odd cut, co-postman, and odd circuit problems. Seymour's characterization of matroids having the max-flow min-cut property can be specialized to each of these four problems to show that the property holds whenever the graph has no certain excluded minor. We develop a framework for characterizing graphs not having these excluded minors and use the excluded minor characterizations to solve each of the four optimization problems. In this way, a constructive proof of Seymour's theorem is given for these special cases. We also show how to solve the Chinese postman problem on graphs having no four-wheel minor, where the max-flow min-cut property need not hold.     

Characterizations of bipartite and Eulerian partial duals of ribbon graphs

Huggett and Moffatt characterized all bipartite partial duals of a plane graph in terms of all-crossing directions of its medial graph. Then Metsidik and Jin characterized all Eulerian partial duals of a plane graph in terms of semi-crossing directions of its medial graph. Plane graphs are ribbon graphs with genus 0. In this paper, by introducing the notion of modified medial graphs and using their all-crossing directions, we first extend Huggett and Moffatt’s result from plane graphs to ribbon graphs. Then we characterize all Eulerian partial duals of any ribbon graph in terms of crossing-total directions of its medial graph, which are simpler than semi-crossing directions.     

Achievable sets, brambles, and sparse treewidth obstructions

One consequence of the graph minor theorem is that for every k there exists a finite obstruction set Obs(TW?k). However, relatively little is known about these sets, and very few general obstructions are known. The ones that are known are the cliques, and graphs which are formed by removing a few edges from a clique. This paper gives several general constructions of minimal forbidden minors which are sparse in the sense that the ratio of the treewidth to the number of vertices n does not approach 1 as n approaches infinity. We accomplish this by a novel combination of using brambles to provide lower bounds and achievable sets to demonstrate upper bounds. Additionally, we determine the exact treewidth of other basic graph constructions which are not minimal forbidden minors.     

On possible counterexamples to Negami's planar cover conjecture

A simple graph H is a cover of a graph G if there exists a mapping φ from H onto G such that φ maps the neighbors of every vertex υ in H bijectively to the neighbors of φ (υ) in G . Negami conjectured in 1986 that a connected graph has a finite planar cover if and only if it embeds in the projective plane. The conjecture is still open. It follows from the results of Archdeacon, Fellows, Negami, and the first author that the conjecture holds as long as the graph K _1,2,2,2 has no finite planar cover. However, those results seem to say little about counterexamples if the conjecture was not true. We show that there are, up to obvious constructions, at most 16 possible counterexamples to Negami's conjecture. Moreover, we exhibit a finite list of sets of graphs such that the set of excluded minors for the property of having finite planar cover is one of the sets in our list. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 46: 183–206, 2004     

Forbidden minors for wye‐delta‐wye reducibility

A graph is Y Δ Y reducible if it can be reduced to a single vertex by a sequence of series‐parallel reductions and Y Δ Y transformations. The class of Y Δ Y reducible graphs is minor closed. We found a large number of minor minimal Y Δ Y irreducible graphs: a family of 57578 31‐edge graphs and another 40‐edge graph. It is still an open problem to characterize Y Δ Y reducible graphs in terms of a finite set of forbidden minors. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 47: 317–321, 2004     

Topological Minors of Cover Graphs and Dimension

We show that posets of bounded height whose cover graphs exclude a fixed graph as a topological minor have bounded dimension. This result was already proven by Walczak. However, our argument is entirely combinatorial and does not rely on structural decomposition theorems. Given a poset with large dimension but bounded height, we directly find a large clique subdivision in its cover graph. Therefore, our proof is accessible to readers not familiar with topological graph theory, and it allows us to provide explicit upper bounds on the dimension. With the introduced tools we show a second result that is supporting a conjectured generalization of the previous result. We prove that ‐free posets whose cover graphs exclude a fixed graph as a topological minor contain only standard examples of size bounded in terms of k.     

Cycle and circle tests of balance in gain graphs: Forbidden minors and their groups

We examine two criteria for balance of a gain graph, one based on binary cycles and one on circles. The graphs for which each criterion is valid depend on the set of allowed gain groups. The binary cycle test is invalid, except for forests, if any possible gain group has an element of odd order. Assuming all groups are allowed, or all abelian groups, or merely the cyclic group of order 3, we characterize, both constructively and by forbidden minors, the graphs for which the circle test is valid. It turns out that these three classes of groups have the same set of forbidden minors. The exact reason for the importance of the ternary cyclic group is not clear. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory     

The traveling salesman problem in graphs with some excluded minors

Given a graph and a length function defined on its edge-set, the Traveling Salesman Problem can be described as the problem of finding a family of edges (an edge may be chosen several times) which forms a spanning Eulerian subgraph of minimum length. In this paper we characterize those graphs for which the convex hull of all solutions is given by the nonnegativity constraints and the classical cut constraints. This characterization is given in terms of excluded minors. A constructive characterization is also given which uses a small number of basic graphs.     

Forbidding Kuratowski Graphs as Immersions

Immersion is a containment relation on graphs that is weaker than topological minor. (Every topological minor of a graph is also its immersion.) The graphs that do not contain any of the Kuratowski graphs (K₅ and K_{3, 3}) as topological minors are exactly planar graphs. We give a structural characterization of graphs that exclude the Kuratowski graphs as immersions. We prove that they can be constructed from planar graphs that are subcubic or of branch‐width at most 10 by repetitively applying i‐edge‐sums, for . We also use this result to give a structural characterization of graphs that exclude K_{3, 3} as an immersion.     

Excluded-Minor Characterization of Apex-Outerplanar Graphs

The class of outerplanar graphs is minor-closed and can be characterized by two excluded minors: \(K_4\) and \(K_{2,3}\). The class of graphs that contain a vertex whose removal leaves an outerplanar graph is also minor-closed. We provide the complete list of 57 excluded minors for this class.     

Minimally non-Pfaffian graphs

We consider the question of characterizing Pfaffian graphs. We exhibit an infinite family of non-Pfaffian graphs minimal with respect to the matching minor relation. This is in sharp contrast with the bipartite case, as Little [C.H.C. Little, A characterization of convertible (0,1)-matrices, J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 18 (1975) 187–208] proved that every bipartite non-Pfaffian graph contains a matching minor isomorphic to K_3,3. We relax the notion of a matching minor and conjecture that there are only finitely many (perhaps as few as two) non-Pfaffian graphs minimal with respect to this notion.We define Pfaffian factor-critical graphs and study them in the second part of the paper. They seem to be of interest as the number of near perfect matchings in a Pfaffian factor-critical graph can be computed in polynomial time. We give a polynomial time recognition algorithm for this class of graphs and characterize non-Pfaffian factor-critical graphs in terms of forbidden central subgraphs.     

Partial Characterizations of 1‐Perfectly Orientable Graphs

We study the class of 1‐perfectly orientable graphs, that is, graphs having an orientation in which every out‐neighborhood induces a tournament. 1‐perfectly orientable graphs form a common generalization of chordal graphs and circular arc graphs. Even though they can be recognized in polynomial time, little is known about their structure. In this article, we develop several results on 1‐perfectly orientable graphs. In particular, we (i) give a characterization of 1‐perfectly orientable graphs in terms of edge clique covers, (ii) identify several graph transformations preserving the class of 1‐perfectly orientable graphs, (iii) exhibit an infinite family of minimal forbidden induced minors for the class of 1‐perfectly orientable graphs, and (iv) characterize the class of 1‐perfectly orientable graphs within the classes of cographs and of cobipartite graphs. The class of 1‐perfectly orientable cobipartite graphs coincides with the class of cobipartite circular arc graphs.