Canonical Representations for Circular-Arc Graphs Using Flip Sets

Abstract: We show that computing canonical representations for circular-arc (CA) graphs reduces to computing certain subsets of vertices called flip sets. For a broad class of CA graphs, which we call uniform, it suffices to compute a CA representation to find such flip sets. As a consequence canonical representations for uniform CA graphs can be obtained in polynomial-time. We then investigate what kind of CA graphs pose a challenge to this approach. This leads us to introduce the notion of restricted CA matrices and show that the canonical representation problem for CA graphs is logspace-reducible to that of restricted CA matrices. As a byproduct, we obtain the result that CA graphs without induced 4-cycles can be canonized in logspace.