Homotopy groups of Hom complexes of graphs

The notion of ×-homotopy from [Doca] is investigated in the context of the category of pointed graphs. The main result is a long exact sequence that relates the higher homotopy groups of the space Hom∗(G,H) with the homotopy groups of Hom∗(G,H ). Here Hom∗(G,H) is a space which parameterizes pointed graph maps from G to H (a pointed version of the usual Hom complex), and H is the graph of based paths in H. As a corollary it is shown that πi `