Modular Decomposition of Graphs and the Distance Preserving Property

05/24/2018

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by   Emad Zahedi, et al.

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Given a graph G, a subgraph H is isometric if d_H(u,v) = d_G(u,v) for every pair u,v∈ V(H), where d is the distance function. A graph G is distance preserving (dp) if it has an isometric subgraph of every possible order. A graph is sequentially distance preserving (sdp) if its vertices can be ordered such that deleting the first i vertices results in an isometric subgraph, for all i>1. We introduce a generalisation of the lexicographic product of graphs, which can be used to non-trivially describe graphs. This generalisation is the inverse of the modular decomposition of graphs, which divides the graph into disjoint clusters called modules. Using these operations, we give a necessary and sufficient condition for graphs to be dp. Finally, we show that the Cartesian product of a dp graph and an sdp graph is dp.