The Simultaneous Membership Problem for Chordal, Comparability and Permutation graphs

In this paper we introduce the simultaneous membership problem, defined for any graph class C characterized in terms of representations, e.g. any class of intersection graphs. Two graphs G1 and G2, sharing some vertices X (and the corresponding induced edges), are said to be simultaneous members of graph class C, if there exist representations R1 and R2 of G1 and G2 that are “consistent” on X . Equivalently (for the classes C that we consider) there exist edges E between G1 −X and G2 −X such that G1 ∪G2 ∪ E belongs to class C. Simultaneous membership problems have application in any situation where it is desirable to consistently represent two related graphs, for example: interval graphs capturing overlaps of DNA fragments of two similar organisms; or graphs connected in time, where one is an updated version of the other. Simultaneous membership problems are related to simultaneous planar embeddings, graph sandwich problems and probe graph recognition problems. In this paper we give efficient algorithms for the simultaneous membership problem on chordal, comparability and permutation graphs. These results imply that graph sandwich problems for the above classes are tractable for an interesting special case: when the set of optional edges form a complete bipartite graph. Our results complement the recent polynomial time recognition algorithms for probe chordal, comparability, and permutation graphs, where the set of optional edges form a clique.