Linear Time Algorithms for Dominating Pairs in Asteroidal Triple-free Graphs

An independent set of three vertices is called an asteroidal triple if between each pair in the triple there exists a path that avoids the neighborhood of the third. A graph is asteroidal triple-free (AT-free) if it contains no asteroidal triple. The motivation for this investigation is provided, in part, by the fact that AT-free graphs offer a common generalization of interval, permutation, trapezoid, and cocomparability graphs. Previously, the authors have given an existential proof of the fact that every connected AT-free graph contains a dominating pair, that is, a pair of vertices such that every path joining them is a dominating set in the graph. The main contribution of this paper is a constructive proof of the existence of dominating pairs in connected AT-free graphs. The resulting simple algorithm, based on the well-known lexicographic breadth-first search, can be implemented to run in time linear in the size of the input, whereas the best algorithm previously known for this problem has complexity O(|V|3) for input graph G=(V,E). In addition, we indicate how our algorithm can be extended to find, in time linear in the size of the input, all dominating pairs in a connected AT-free graph with diameter greater than 3. A remarkable feature of the extended algorithm is that, even though there may be O(|V|2) dominating pairs, the algorithm can compute and represent them in linear time.