A model for finding transition-minors

Abstract

The well known cycle double cover conjecture in graph theory is strongly related to the compatible circuit decomposition problem. A recent result by Fleischner et al. (2018) gives a sufficient condition for the existence of a compatible circuit decomposition in a transitioned 2-connected Eulerian graph, which is based on an extension of the definition of K5-minors to transitioned graphs. Graphs satisfying this condition are called SUD-K5-minor-free graphs. In this work we formulate a generalization of this property by replacing the K5 by a 4-regular transitioned graph H, which is part of the input. Furthermore, we consider the decision problem of checking for two given graphs if the extended property holds. We prove that this problem is NP-complete and fixed parameter tractable with the size of H as parameter. We then formulate an equivalent problem, present a mathematical model for it, and prove its correctness. This mathematical model is then translated into a mixed integer linear program (MIP) for solving it in practice. Computational results show that the MIP formulation can be solved for small instances in reasonable time. In our computations we found snarks with perfect matchings whose contraction leads to SUD-K5-minor-free graphs that contain K5-minors. Furthermore, we verified that there exists a perfect pseudo-matching whose contraction leads to a SUD-K5-minor-free graph for all snarks with up to 22 vertices.