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arXiv · 1102.3016

Fire Containment in Planar Graphs

Louis Esperet·Jan van den Heuvel·Frédéric Maffray·Félix Sipma
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Abstract

In a graph $G$, a fire starts at some vertex. At every time step, firefighters can protect up to $k$ vertices, and then the fire spreads to all unprotected neighbours. The $k$-surviving rate $\rho_k(G)$ of $G$ is the expectation of the proportion of vertices that can be saved from the fire, if the starting vertex of the fire is chosen uniformly at random. For a given class of graphs $\cG$ we are interested in the minimum value $k$ such that $\rho_k(G)\ge\epsilon$ for some constant $\epsilon>0$ and all $G\in\cG$ i.e., such that linearly many vertices are expected to be saved in every graph from $\cG$). In this note, we prove that for planar graphs this minimum value is at most 4, and that it is precisely 2 for triangle-free planar graphs.

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Louis Esperet, Jan van den Heuvel, Frédéric Maffray, Félix Sipma. 2011-02-15. Fire Containment in Planar Graphs. https://doi.org/10.1002/jgt.21673

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