Few Induced Disjoint Paths for H-Free Graphs

Abstract

Paths P 1 , . . . , P k in a graph G = (V , E) are mutually induced if any two distinct P i and P j have neither common vertices nor adjacent vertices. For a fixed integer k, the k-Induced Disjoint Paths problem is to decide if a graph G with k pairs of specified vertices (s i , t i ) contains k mutually induced paths P i such that each P i starts from s i and ends at t i . Whereas the non-induced version is well-known to be polynomial-time solvable for every fixed integer k, a classical result from the literature states that even 2-Induced Disjoint Paths is NP-complete. We prove new complexity results for k-Induced Disjoint Paths if the input is restricted to H-free graphs, that is, graphs without a fixed graph H as an induced subgraph. We compare our results with a complexity dichotomy for Induced Disjoint Paths, the variant where k is part of the input.