Strongly orderable graphs - A common generalization of strongly chordal and chordal bipartite graphs

In this paper those graphs are studied for which a so-called strong ordering of the vertex set exists. This class of graphs, called strongly orderable graphs, generalizes the strongly chordal graphs and the chordal bipartite graphs in a quite natural way. We consider two characteristic elimination orderings for strongly orderable graphs, one on the vertex set and the second on the edge set, and prove that these graphs can be recognized in O(\V\ + \E\)\V\ time. Moreover, a special strong ordering of a strongly orderable graph can be produced in the same lime bound. We present variations of greedy algorithms that compute a minimum coloring, a maximum clique, a minimum clique partition and a maximum independent set of a strongly orderable graph in linear time if such a special strong ordering is given. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.