Zero forcing sets and bipartite circulants

In this paper we introduce a class of regular bipartite graphs whose biadjacency matrices are circulant matrices – a generalization of circulant graphs which happen to be bipartite – and we describe some of their properties. Notably, we compute upper and lower bounds for the zero forcing number for such a graph based only on the parameters that describe its biadjacency matrix. The main results of the paper characterize the bipartite circulant graphs that achieve equality in the lower bound and compute their minimum ranks.