Approximation of Pathwidth of Outerplanar Graphs

Abstract

There exists a polynomial time algorithm to compute the pathwidth of outerplanar graphs [], but the large exponent makes this algorithm impractical. In this paper, we give an algorithm, that given a biconnected outerplanar graph G, finds a path decomposition of G of pathwidth at most twice the pathwidth of G plus one. To obtain the result, several relations between the pathwidth of a biconnected outerplanar graph and its dual are established.