Linear layouts of weakly triangulated graphs

A graph [Formula: see text] is said to be triangulated if it has no chordless cycles of length 4 or more. Such a graph is said to be rigid if, for a valid assignment of edge lengths, it has a unique linear layout and non-rigid otherwise. Damaschke [Point placement on the line by distance data, Discrete Appl. Math. 127(1) (2003) 53–62] showed how to compute all linear layouts of a triangulated graph, for a valid assignment of lengths to the edges of [Formula: see text]. In this paper, we extend this result to weakly triangulated graphs, resolving an open problem. A weakly triangulated graph can be constructively characterized by a peripheral ordering of its edges. The main contribution of this paper is to exploit such an edge order to identify the rigid and non-rigid components of [Formula: see text]. We first show that a weakly triangulated graph without articulation points has at most [Formula: see text] different linear layouts, where [Formula: see text] is the number of quadrilaterals (4-cycles) in [Formula: see text]. When [Formula: see text] has articulation points, the number of linear layouts is at most [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is the number of nodes in the block tree of [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] is the total number of quadrilaterals over all the blocks. Finally, we propose an algorithm for computing a peripheral edge order of [Formula: see text] by exploiting an interesting connection between this problem and the problem of identifying a two-pair in [Formula: see text]. Using an [Formula: see text] time solution for the latter problem, we propose an [Formula: see text] time algorithm for computing its peripheral edge order, where [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] are respectively the number of edges and vertices of [Formula: see text]. For sparse graphs, the time complexity can be improved to [Formula: see text], using the concept of handles [R. B. Hayward, J. P. Spinrad and R. Sritharan, Improved algorithms for weakly chordal graphs, ACM Trans. Algorithms 3(2) (2007) 19pp].