On classes of minimal circular-imperfect graphs

Circular-perfect graphs form a natural superclass of perfect graphs: on the one hand due to their definition by means of a more general coloring concept, on the other hand as an important class of χ-bound graphs with the smallest non-trivial χ-binding function χ(G) ≤ ω(G) + 1. The Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture, recently settled by Chudnovsky et al. [4], provides a characterization of perfect graphs by means of forbidden subgraphs. It is, therefore, natural to ask for an analogous conjecture for circular-perfect graphs, that is for a characterization of all minimal circular-imperfect graphs. At present, not many minimal circular-imperfect graphs are known. This paper studies the circular-(im)perfection of some families of graphs: normalized circular cliques, partitionable graphs, planar graphs, and complete joins. We thereby exhibit classes of minimal circular-imperfect graphs, namely, certain partitionable webs, a subclass of planar graphs, and odd wheels and odd antiwheels. As those classes appear to be very different from a structural point of view, we infer that formulating ha l-0 03 07 75 5, v er si on 1 3 N ov 2 00 8 Author manuscript, published in "Discrete Applied Mathematics 156 (2008) 998--1010"