Cop-width, flip-width and strong colouring numbers

Abstract

Cop-width and flip-width are new families of graph parameters introduced by Toruńczyk (2023) that generalise treewidth, degeneracy, generalised colouring numbers, clique-width and twin-width. In this paper, we bound the cop-width and flip-width of a graph by its strong colouring numbers. In particular, we show that for every $r\in \mathbb{N}$, every graph $G$ has ${\text{copwidth}}_r(G)\le {\text{scol}}_{4r}(G)$. This implies that every class of graphs with linear strong colouring numbers has linear cop-width and linear flip-width. We use this result to deduce improved bounds for cop-width and flip-width for various sparse graph classes.