Combinatorial properties of boundary NLC graph languages

Abstract

Node label controlled (NLC) grammars are graph grammars (operating on node labeled undirected graphs)which rewrite single nodes only and establish connections between the embedded graph and the neighbors of the rewritten node on the basis of the labels of the involved nodes only. They define (possibly infinite) languages of undirected node labeled graphs (or, if we just omit the labels, languages of unlabeled graphs). Boundary NLC (BNLC) grammars are NLC grammars with the property that whenever - in a graph already generated - two nodes may be rewritten, then these nodes are not adjacent. The graph languages generated by this type of grammars are called BNLC languages. In this paper we investigate the behaviour of graph invariants within BNLC languages. First we demonstrate that there is a dependency between the chromatic number and the clique number of graphs in BNLC languages (while this is wellknown not to be true for arbitrary graph languages). Secondly, we introduce a new graph invariant, the so-called index of a graph which seems to be very suitable for describing the adjacency structure of a graph. Then we prove that every BNLC language is of bounded index (which is shown not to be true for arbitrary graph languages). Thus we exhibit properties (concerning graph invariants) of BNLC languages which are intrinsic to this class. We use them to demonstrate that certain graph languages are not BNLC languages.