Generating all maximal induced subgraphs for hereditary and connected-hereditary graph properties

This paper investigates a graph enumeration problem, called the maximal Psubgraphs problem, where P is a hereditary or connected-hereditary graph property. Formally, given a graph G, the maximal P-subgraphs problem is to generate all maximal induced subgraphs of G that satisfy P. This problem differs from the wellknown node-deletion problem, studied by Yannakakis and Lewis [1–3]. In the maximal P-subgraphs problem, the goal is to produce all (locally) maximal subgraphs of a graph that have property P, whereas in the node-deletion problem, the goal is to find a single (globally) maximum size subgraph with property P. Algorithms are presented that reduce the maximal P-subgraphs problem to an input-restricted version of this problem. These algorithms imply that when attempting to efficiently solve the maximal P-subgraphs problem for a specific P, it is sufficient to solve the restricted case. The main contributions of this paper are characterizations of when the maximal P-subgraphs problem is in a complexity class C (e.g., polynomial delay, total polynomial time).