On a New Approach for Finding All the Modified Cut-Sets in an Incompatibility Graph

Abstract

The compatibility relation occurs in many different disciplines in science and engineering. When a compatibility relation exists between pairs of elements in a set, an important problem is to derive the collection of aU those elements that form maximal compatibles. If the set of elements with the compatibility relation can be visualized as a compatibility graph of which the different nodes represent the elements of the set, the only edges of the graph being the nonoriented lines joining pairs of elements with the compatibility relation, then the problem of deriving the maximal compatibles becomes identical to the graph theory problem of finding all the maximal complete subgraphs in a symmetric graph. Recently, in connection with simplifying incompletely specified sequential machines, where a kind of compatibility relation also exists between pairs of internal states, Das and Sheng proposed a method for deriving the different maximal compatibles through finding all of the modified cut-sets of the incompatibility graph of the machine. This paper, without confining itself to only incompletely specified machines, considers the problem involving the compatibility relation in a broader perspective and suggests a new approach for finding aU the modified cut-sets of the incompatibility graph of a set having a compatibility relation between its different pairs of elements.