A graph is well-covered if all its maximal independent sets are of the same cardinality. Deciding whether a given graph is well-covered is known to be NP-hard in general, and solvable in polynomial time, if the input is restricted to certain families of graphs. We present here a simple structural characterization of well-covered graphs and then apply it to the recognition problem. Apparently, p...

A graph G is well-covered if all its maximal independent sets are of the same cardinality. Assume that a weight function w is defined on its vertices. Then G is w-well-covered if all maximal independent sets are of the same weight. For every graph G, the set of weight functions w such that G is w-well-covered is a vector space. Given an input graph G without cycles of length 4, 5, and 6, we cha...

If sk equals the number of stable sets of cardinality k in the graph G, then I(G; x) = α(G) ∑ k=0 skx k is the independence polynomial of G (Gutman and Harary, 1983). Alavi, Malde, Schwenk and Erdös (1987) conjectured that I(G; x) is unimodal whenever G is a forest, while Brown, Dilcher and Nowakowski (2000) conjectured that I(G; x) is unimodal for any well-covered graph G. Michael and Traves (...

A weighted graph G is called well-covered if all its maximal stable sets have the same weight. G. Let S be a stable set of G (possibly, S = ;). The subgraph G?NS] is called a co-stable subgraph of G. We denote by CSub(G) the set of all co-stable subgraphs of G (considered up to isomorphism). A class of weighted graphs P is called co-hereditary if it is closed under taking co-stable subgraphs, i...