The Interplay Between Domination and Separation in Graphs

Abstract

In the literature, several identification problems in graphs have been studied, of which, the most widely studied are the ones based on dominating sets as a tool of identification. Hereby, the objective is to separate any two vertices of a graph by their unique neighborhoods in a suitably chosen dominating or total-dominating set. Such a (total-)dominating set endowed with a separation property is often referred to as a code of the graph. In this paper, we study the four separation properties location, closed-separation, open-separation and full-separation. We address the complexity of finding minimum separating sets in a graph and study the interplay of these separation properties with several codes (establishing a particularly close relation between separation and codes based on domination) as well as the interplay of separation and complementation (showing that location and full-separation are the same on a graph and its complement, whereas closed-separation in a graph corresponds to open-separation in its complement).