We investigate the complexity of finding a transformation from a given spanning tree in a graph to another given spanning tree in the same graph via a sequence of edge flips. The exchange property of the matroid bases immediately yields that such a transformation always exists if we have no constraints on spanning trees. In this paper, we wish to find a transformation which passes through only spanning trees satisfying some constraint. Our focus is bounding either the maximum degree or the diameter of spanning trees, and we give the following results. The problem with a lower bound on maximum degree is solvable in polynomial time, while the problem with an upper bound on maximum degree is PSPACE-complete. The problem with a lower bound on diameter is NP-hard, while the problem with an upper bound on diameter is solvable in polynomial time.

Let $G$ be a graph and $T_1,T_2$ be two spanning trees of $G$. We say that $T_1$ can be transformed into $T_2$ via an edge flip if there exist two edges $e \in T_1$ and $f$ in $T_2$ such that $T_2= (T_1 \setminus e) \cup f$. Since spanning trees form a matroid, one can indeed transform a spanning tree into any other via a sequence of edge flips, as observed by Ito et al. We investigate the problem of determining, given two spanning trees $T_1,T_2$ with an additional property $Π$, if there exists an edge flip transformation from $T_1$ to $T_2$ keeping property $Π$ all along. First we show that determining if there exists a transformation from $T_1$ to $T_2$ such that all the trees of the sequence have at most $k$ (for any fixed $k \ge 3$) leaves is PSPACE-complete. We then prove that determining if there exists a transformation from $T_1$ to $T_2$ such that all the trees of the sequence have at least $k$ leaves (where $k$ is part of the input) is PSPACE-complete even restricted to split, bipartite or planar graphs. We complete this result by showing that the problem becomes polynomial for cographs, interval graphs and when $k=n-2$.

A k-coloring of a graph maps each vertex of the graph to a color in {1, 2, …, k}, such that no two adjacent vertices receive the same color. Given a k-coloring of a graph, a Kempe change produces a new k-coloring by swapping the colors in a bicolored connected component. We investigate the complexity of finding the smallest number of Kempe changes needed to transform a given k-coloring into another given k-coloring. We show that this problem admits a polynomial-time dynamic programming algorithm on path graphs, which turns out to be highly non-trivial. Furthermore, the problem is NP-hard even on star graphs and we show that on such graphs it admits a constant-factor approximation algorithm and is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the number k of colors. The hardness result as well as the algorithmic results are based on the notion of a canonical transformation.

In this paper, we study the problem of deciding if there is a transformation between two given minimum Steiner trees of an unweighted graph such that each transformation step respects a prescribed reconfiguration rule and results in another minimum Steiner tree of the graph. We consider two reconfiguration rules, both of which exchange a single vertex at a time, and generalize the known reconfiguration problem for shortest paths in an unweighted graph. This generalization implies that our problems under both reconfiguration rules are PSPACE-complete for bipartite graphs. We thus study the problems with respect to graph classes, and give some boundaries between the polynomial-time solvable and PSPACE-complete cases.