Weighted Book Thickness

Abstract

We introduce and study the weighted book thickness of graphs. A $k$-page book embedding of a graph $G=(V,E)$ is defined by a spanning cycle $C$ for $V$ (which does not need to be part of $G$) and a partition $E={\bigcup }_{i=1}^k{E}_i$ such that $E\cap C\subseteq E_1$ and each graph $G_i=(V,E_i\cup C)$, for $1\le i\le k$, is outerplane with outer cycle $C$. If $e\in E_i$, we say that $e$ appears on Page $i$. The classical book thickness of a graph $G$ is the minimum $k$ such that there exists a $k$-page book embedding of $G$, that is, the minimum (over all book embeddings of $G$) achievable maximum page an edge appears on. In contrast, the weighted book thickness is the minimum achievable average page an edge appears on. The embeddings that realize weighted book thickness can differ from those that realize (classical) book thickness. We show that, although every planar graph on at most nine vertices admits a 2-page book embedding realizing its weighted book thickness, already for ten vertices, there is a planar graph for which every realization of its weighted book thickness needs more pages than its book thickness. We prove that there even exists a 2-tree whose weighted book thickness cannot be realized on two pages. On the positive side, we show that for every graph of pathwidth at most two, the weighted book thickness can always be realized by a 2-page book embedding and such an embedding can be found in linear time. Moreover, we prove that it is NP-complete to decide if the weighted book thickness is at most $k$, for some given integer $k$.

Appears in the Proceedings of the 34th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2026)