Partitions of planar point sets into polygons

Abstract

In this paper, we characterize planar point sets that can be partitioned into disjoint polygons of arbitrarily specified sizes. We provide an algorithm to construct such a partition, if it exists, in polynomial time. We show that this problem is equivalent to finding a specified $2$-factor in the visibility graph of the point set. The characterization for the case where all cycles have length $3$ also translates to finding a $K_3$-factor of the visibility graph of the point set. We show that the generalized problem of finding a $K_k$-factor of the visibility graph of a given point set for $k\ge 5$ is NP-hard.