On Embeddability of Unit Disk Graphs Onto Straight Lines

Abstract

Unit disk graphs are the intersection graphs of unit radius disks in the Euclidean plane. Deciding whether there exists an embedding of a given unit disk graph, i.e. unit disk graph recognition, is an important geometric problem, and has many application areas. In general, this problem is known to be \(\exists \mathbb {R}\)-complete. In some applications, the objects that correspond to unit disks, have predefined (geometrical) structures to be placed on. Hence, many researchers attacked this problem by restricting the domain of the disk centers. Following the same line, we also describe a polynomial-time reduction which shows that deciding whether a graph can be realized as unit disks onto given straight lines is NP-hard, when the given lines are parallel to either x-axis or y-axis. Adjusting the reduction, we also show that this problem is NP-complete when the given lines are only parallel to x-axis. We obtain those results using the idea of the logic engine introduced by Bhatt and Cosmadakis in 1987.