PQ-trees [Booth, 1975; Kellogg S. Booth and George S. Lueker, 1976] (and their more general variant PC-trees [Hsu and McConnell, 2003; Wei-Kuan and Wen-Lian, 1999]) are a well-known data structure for representing the set of linear (or for PC-trees, circular) orders respecting a given set of consecutivity constraints. Each such constraint is specified by a set of elements and requires that these elements appear consecutively in the linear (or circular) order; thus, they disallow the set to be interleaved with its complement. The main operation supported by these data structures is thus the so-called update, which takes as input a set that forms an additional constraint, and in response changes the tree in order to restrict the represented orders to those satisfying the new constraint. Interpreting a given tree is straightforward: leaves represent the underlying elements, while inner nodes either allow the order of their subtrees to be reversed (Q/C-nodes) or to be arbitrarily permuted (P-nodes). However, the way this structure and the set of represented orders change under updates is less intuitive. We present an interactive web app that allows users to specify sets of consecutivity constraints in the form of a 0/1-matrix and then calculates and visualizes the corresponding PQ- or PC-tree. The constraints can then be changed dynamically while observing how this changes the structure of the tree and the set of represented orders. Through this interactive exploration, we hope to make PQ- and PC-trees more accessible to a wider audience.

Since many real-world graphs are nonplanar, the study of graphs that allow few crossings per edge has been an active subfield of graph theory in recent years. One of the most natural generalizations of planar graphs are the so-called 1-planar graphs that admit a drawing with at most one crossing per edge. Unfortunately, testing whether a graph is 1-planar is known to be NP-complete even for very restricted graph classes. On the positive side, Binucci, Didimo and Montecchiani [Binucci et al., 2023] presented the first practical algorithm for testing 1-planarity based on an easy-to-implement backtracking strategy. We build on this idea and systematically explore the design choices of such algorithms and propose several new ingredients, such as different branching strategies and multiple filter criteria that allow us to reject certain branches in the search tree early on. We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation that evaluates the efficiency and effectiveness of these ingredients. Given a time limit of three hours per instance, our best configuration is able to solve more than 95% of the non-planar instances from the well-known North and Rome graphs with up to 50 vertices. Notably, the median running time for solved instances is well below 4 seconds.

Clique-width and treewidth are two of the most important and useful graph parameters, and several problems can be solved efficiently when restricted to graphs of bounded clique-width or treewidth. Bounded treewidth implies bounded clique-width, but not vice versa. Problems like Longest Cycle, Longest Path, MaxCut, Edge Dominating Set, and Graph Coloring are fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the treewidth, but they cannot be solved in FPT time when parameterized by the clique-width unless FPT = W[1], as shown by Fomin, Golovach, Lokshtanov, and Saurabh [SIAM J. Comput. 2010, SIAM J. Comput. 2014]. For a given problem that is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by treewidth, but intractable when parameterized by clique-width, there may exist infinite families of instances of bounded clique-width and unbounded treewidth where the problem can be solved efficiently. In this work, we initiate a systematic study of the parameters co-treewidth (the treewidth of the complement of the input graph) and co-degeneracy (the degeneracy of the complement of the input graph). We show that Longest Cycle, Longest Path, and Edge Dominating Set are FPT when parameterized by co-degeneracy. On the other hand, Graph Coloring is para-NP-complete when parameterized by co-degeneracy but FPT when parameterized by the co-treewidth. Concerning MaxCut, we give an FPT algorithm parameterized by co-treewidth, while we leave open the complexity of the problem parameterized by co-degeneracy. Additionally, we show that Precoloring Extension is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by co-treewidth, while this problem is known to be W[1]-hard when parameterized by treewidth. These results give evidence that co-treewidth is a useful width parameter for handling dense instances of problems for which an FPT algorithm for clique-width is unlikely to exist. Finally, we develop an algorithmic framework for co-degeneracy based on the notion of Bondy-Chvátal closure.

In the constrained planarity setting, we ask whether a graph admits a planar drawing that additionally satisfies a given set of constraints. These constraints are often derived from very natural problems; prominent examples are Level planarity, where vertices have to lie on given horizontal lines indicating a hierarchy, and clustered planarity, where we additionally draw the boundaries of clusters which recursively group the vertices in a crossing-free manner. Despite receiving significant amount of attention and substantial theoretical progress on these problems, only very few of the found solutions have been put into practice and evaluated experimentally.

We consider three simple quadratic time algorithms for the problem Level Planarity and give a level-planar instance that they either falsely report as negative or for which they output a drawing that is not level planar.

We introduce the problem S ynchronized P lanarity . Roughly speaking, its input is a loop-free multi-graph together with synchronization constraints that, e.g., match pairs of vertices of equal degree by providing a bijection between their edges. S ynchronized P lanarity then asks whether the graph admits a crossing-free embedding into the plane such that the orders of edges around synchronized vertices are consistent. We show, on the one hand, that S ynchronized P lanarity can be solved in quadratic time, and, on the other hand, that it serves as a powerful modeling language that lets us easily formulate several constrained planarity problems as instances of S ynchronized P lanarity . In particular, this lets us solve C lustered P lanarity in quadratic time, where the most efficient previously known algorithm has an upper bound of O ( n 8 ).

We introduce the problem Synchronized Planarity. Roughly speaking, its input is a loop-free multi-graph together with synchronization constraints that, e.g., match pairs of vertices of equal degree by providing a bijection between their edges. Synchronized Planarity then asks whether the graph admits a crossing-free embedding into the plane such that the orders of edges around synchronized vertices are consistent. We show, on the one hand, that Synchronized Planarity can be solved in quadratic time, and, on the other hand, that it serves as a powerful modeling language that lets us easily formulate several constrained planarity problems as instances of Synchronized Planarity. In particular, this lets us solve Clustered Planarity in quadratic time, where the most efficient previously known algorithm has an upper bound of O(n⁸).

In the Internet of Things (IoT), security is important and challenging; however, it is often neglected. This paper presents a smart home scenario, together with its requirements for a secure and user friendly mutual authentication protocol. Protocols developed for the internet are often not applicable to the Internet of Things due to hardware limitations and physical inaccessibility of devices. To tackle the challenge of a usable and secure device authentication in the area of the IoT, a QR code based mutual authentication protocol is proposed. The protocol supports two operation modes to handle different hardware configurations with respect to cameras and displays. Both operation modes are secure against attacks within the proposed attacker model. The protocol can also be used to exchange the public keys between two parties, in order to establish a secure channel without a trusted third party.