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arXiv · 2508.15520

Constrained Flips in Plane Spanning Trees

Oswin Aichholzer·Joseph Dorfer·Birgit Vogtenhuber
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Abstract

A flip in a plane spanning tree $T$ is the operation of removing one edge from $T$ and adding another edge such that the resulting structure is again a plane spanning tree. For trees on a set of points in convex position we study two classic types of constrained flips: (1)~Compatible flips are flips in which the removed and inserted edge do not cross each other. We relevantly improve the previous upper bound of $2n-O(\sqrt{n})$ on the diameter of the compatible flip graph to~$\frac{5n}{3}-O(1)$, by this matching the upper bound for unrestricted flips by Bjerkevik, Kleist, Ueckerdt, and Vogtenhuber [SODA~2025] up to an additive constant of $1$. We further show that no shortest compatible flip sequence removes an edge that is already in its target position. Using this so-called happy edge property, we derive a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm to compute the shortest compatible flip sequence between two given trees. (2)~Rotations are flips in which the removed and inserted edge share a common vertex. Besides showing that the happy edge property does not hold for rotations, we improve the previous upper bound of $2n-O(1)$ for the diameter of the rotation graph to~$\frac{7n}{4}-O(1)$.

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BibTeXRIS

Oswin Aichholzer, Joseph Dorfer, Birgit Vogtenhuber. 2025-08-21. Constrained Flips in Plane Spanning Trees. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15520

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