The Complexity of Bicriteria Tree-Depth

Abstract: The tree-depth problem can be seen as finding an elimination tree of minimum height for a given input graph $G$. We introduce a bicriteria generalization in which additionally the width of the elimination tree needs to be bounded by some input integer $b$. We are interested in the case when $G$ is the line graph of a tree, proving that the problem is NP-hard and obtaining a polynomial-time additive $2b$-approximation algorithm. This particular class of graphs received significant attention in the past, mainly due to a number of potential applications, e.g. in parallel assembly of modular products, or parallel query processing in relational databases, as well as purely combinatorial applications, including searching in tree-like partial orders (which in turn generalizes binary search on sorted data).