On-line coloring between two lines

Abstract: We study on-line colorings of certain graphs given as intersection graphs of objects "between two lines", i.e., there is a pair of horizontal lines such that each object of the representation is a connected set contained in the strip between the lines and touches both. Some of the graph classes admitting such a representation are permutation graphs (segments), interval graphs (axis-aligned rectangles), trapezoid graphs (trapezoids) and cocomparability graphs (simple curves). We present an on-line algorithm coloring graphs given by convex sets between two lines that uses $O(\omega^3)$ colors on graphs with maximum clique size $\omega$. In contrast intersection graphs of segments attached to a single line may force any on-line coloring algorithm to use an arbitrary number of colors even when $\omega=2$. The {\em left-of} relation makes the complement of intersection graphs of objects between two lines into a poset. As an aside we discuss the relation of the class $\mathcal{C}$ of posets obtained from convex sets between two lines with some other classes of posets: all $2$-dimensional posets and all posets of height $2$ are in $\mathcal{C}$ but there is a $3$-dimensional poset of height $3$ that does not belong to $\mathcal{C}$. We also show that the on-line coloring problem for curves between two lines is as hard as the on-line chain partition problem for arbitrary posets.