Technical Report 215-1989

Title
Graph Separation is NP-hard even for Graphs with Bounded Degree
Authors
Dorothea Wagner and Frank Wagner
Source
The report may be requested from our secretary Gabriele Klink, email: klink@math.tu-berlin.de
Classification
not available
Keywords
not available
Abstract
One of the basic problems in VLSI-layout is the construction of a minimal decomposition of a graph, i.e. a partition or cut of the vertex-set into two pieces of not too different size which cuts the least possible number of edges. Not too different means that the size of each of the parts is at least a constant fraction of the total number of the graph vertices. We show that (the decision version of) this problem is cal NP-hard. The result holds even if the graphs to be separated have maximal degree four, a typical restriction in the theory of VLSI layout.