On the Complexity of Computing Treebreadth

During the last decade, metric properties of the bags of tree decompositions of graphs have been studied. Roughly, the length and the breadth of a tree decomposition are the maximum diameter and radius of its bags respectively. The treelength and the treebreadth of a graph are the minimum length and breadth of its tree decompositions respectively. Pathlength and pathbreadth are defined similarly for path decompositions. In this paper, we answer open questions of Dragan and Köhler (Algorithmica 69(4):884–905, 2014) and Dragan et al. (Algorithm theory—SWAT 2014, Springer, pp 158–169, 2014) about the computational complexity of treebreadth, pathbreadth and pathlength. Namely, we prove that computing these graph invariants is NP-hard. We further investigate graphs with treebreadth one, i.e., graphs that admit a tree decomposition where each bag has a dominating vertex. We show that it is NP-complete to decide whether a graph belongs to this class. We then prove some structural properties of such graphs which allows us to design polynomial-time algorithms to decide whether a bipartite graph, resp., a planar graph (or more generally, a triangle-free graph, resp., a K3,3-minor-free graph), has treebreadth one.