Branchwidth of chordal graphs Original Research Article

This paper revisits the ‘branchwidth territories’ of Kloks, Kratochvíl and Müller [T. Kloks, J. Kratochvíl, H. Müller, New branchwidth territories, in: 16th Ann. Symp. on Theoretical Aspect of Computer Science, STACS, in: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1563, 1999, pp. 173–183] to provide a simpler proof, and a faster algorithm for computing the branchwidth of an interval graph. We also generalize the algorithm to the class of chordal graphs, albeit at the expense of exponential running time. Compliance with the ternary constraint of the branchwidth definition is facilitated by a simple new tool called image-troikas: three sets of size at most image each are a image-troika of set image, if any two have union image. We give a straightforward image algorithm, computing branchwidth for an interval graph on image edges, image vertices and image maximal cliques. We also prove a conjecture of Mazoit [F. Mazoit, A general scheme for deciding the branchwidth, Technical Report RR2004-34, LIP — École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, 2004. ], by showing that branchwidth can be computed in polynomial time for a chordal graph given with a clique tree having a polynomial number of subtrees.