On the upward book thickness problem: Combinatorial and complexity results

Abstract

Among the vast literature concerning graph drawing and graph theory, linear layouts of graphs have been the subject of intense research over the years, both from a combinatorial and from an algorithmic perspective. In particular, upward book embeddings of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) form a popular class of linear layouts with notable applications, and the upward book thickness of a DAG is the minimum number of pages required by any of its upward book embeddings. A long-standing conjecture by Heath, Pemmaraju, and Trenk (1999) states that the upward book thickness of outerplanar DAGs is bounded above by a constant. In this paper, we show that the conjecture holds for subfamilies of upward outerplanar graphs, namely those whose underlying graph is an internally-triangulated outerpath or a cactus, and those whose biconnected components are st-outerplanar graphs. On the complexity side, it is known that deciding whether a graph has upward book thickness k is NP-hard for any fixed k≥3. We show that the problem, for any k≥5, remains NP-hard for graphs whose domination number is O(k), but it is fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) in the vertex cover number.