Book embedding

In graph theory, a book embedding is a generalization of planar embedding of a graph to embeddings in a book, a collection of half-planes all having the same line as their boundary. Usually, the vertices of the graph are required to lie on this boundary line, called the spine, and the edges are required to stay within a single half-plane. The book thickness of a graph is the smallest possible number of half-planes for any book embedding of the graph. Book thickness is also called pagenumber, stacknumber or fixed outerthickness. Book embeddings have also been used to define several other graph invariants including the pagewidth and book crossing number.

Every graph with n vertices has book thickness at most ${\displaystyle \lceil n/2\rceil }$, and this formula gives the exact book thickness for complete graphs. The graphs with book thickness one are the outerplanar graphs. The graphs with book thickness at most two are the subhamiltonian graphs, which are always planar; more generally, every planar graph has book thickness at most four. All minor-closed graph families, and in particular the graphs with bounded treewidth or bounded genus, also have bounded book thickness. It is NP-hard to determine the exact book thickness of a given graph, with or without knowing a fixed vertex ordering along the spine of the book. Testing the existence of a three-page book embedding of a graph, given a fixed ordering of the vertices along the spine of the embedding, has unknown computational complexity: it is neither known to be solvable in polynomial time nor known to be NP-hard.

One of the original motivations for studying book embeddings involved applications in VLSI design, in which the vertices of a book embedding represent components of a circuit and the wires represent connections between them. Book embedding also has applications in graph drawing, where two of the standard visualization styles for graphs, arc diagrams and circular layouts, can be constructed using book embeddings.

In transportation planning, the different sources and destinations of foot and vehicle traffic that meet and interact at a traffic light can be modeled mathematically as the vertices of a graph, with edges connecting different source-destination pairs. A book embedding of this graph can be used to design a schedule that lets all the traffic move across the intersection with as few signal phases as possible. In bioinformatics problems involving the folding structure of RNA, single-page book embeddings represent classical forms of nucleic acid secondary structure, and two-page book embeddings represent pseudoknots. Other applications of book embeddings include abstract algebra and knot theory.