Recent Applications In Graph Theory

Graph theory, being a rigorously investigated field of combinatorial mathematics, is adopted by a wide variety of disciplines addressing a plethora of real-world applications. Advances in graph algorithms and software implementations have made graph theory accessible to a larger community of interest. Ever-increasing interest in machine learning and model deployments for network data demands a coherent selection of topics rewarding a fresh, up-to-date summary of the theory and fruitful applications to probe further. This volume is a small yet unique contribution to graph theory applications and modeling with graphs. The subjects discussed include information hiding using graphs, dynamic graph-based systems to model and control cyber-physical systems, graph reconstruction, average distance neighborhood graphs, and pure and mixed-integer linear programming formulations to cluster networks.

The first part of this text covers the main graph theoretic topics: connectivity, trees, traversability, planarity, colouring, covering, matching, digraphs, networks, matrices of a graph, graph theoretic algorithms, and matroids. These concepts are then applied in the second part to problems in engineering, operations research, and science as well as to an interesting set of miscellaneous problems, thus illustrating their broad applicability. Every effort has been made to present applications that use not merely the notation and terminology of graph theory, but also its actual mathematical results. Some of the applications, such as in molecular evolution, facilities layout, and graffic network design, have never appeared before in book form. Written at an advanced undergraduate to beginning graduate level, this book is suitable for students of mathematics, engineering, operations research, computer science, and physical sciences as well as for researchers and practitioners with an interest in graph theoretic modelling.

This book is prepared as a combination of the manuscripts submitted by respected mathematicians and scientists around the world. As an editor, I truly enjoyed reading each manuscript. Not only will the methods and explanations help you to understand more about graph theory, but I also hope you will find it joyful to discover ways that you can apply graph theory in your scientific field. I believe the book can be read from the beginning to the end at once. However, the book can also be used as a reference guide in order to turn back to it when it is needed. I have to mention that this book assumes the reader to have a basic knowledge about graph theory. The very basics of the theory and terms are not explained at the beginner level. I hope this book will support many applied and research scientists from different scientific fields.

In the spectrum of mathematics, graph theory which studies a mathe matical structure on a set of elements with a binary relation, as a recognized discipline, is a relative newcomer. In recent three decades the exciting and rapidly growing area of the subject abounds with new mathematical devel opments and significant applications to real-world problems. More and more colleges and universities have made it a required course for the senior or the beginning postgraduate students who are majoring in mathematics, computer science, electronics, scientific management and others. This book provides an introduction to graph theory for these students. The richness of theory and the wideness of applications make it impossi ble to include all topics in graph theory in a textbook for one semester. All materials presented in this book, however, I believe, are the most classical, fundamental, interesting and important. The method we deal with the mate rials is to particularly lay stress on digraphs, regarding undirected graphs as their special cases. My own experience from teaching out of the subject more than ten years at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) shows that this treatment makes hardly the course di:fficult, but much more accords with the essence and the development trend of the subject.

Growing specialization and diversification have brought a host of monographs and textbooks on increasingly specialized topics. However, the "tree" of knowledge of mathematics and related fields does not grow only by putting forth new bran ches. It also happens, quite often in fact, that branches which were thought to be completely disparate are suddenly seen to be related. Further, the kind and level of sophistication of mathematics applied in various sciences has changed drastically in recent years: measure theory is used (non-tri vially) in regional and theoretical economics; algebraic geometry interacts with physics; the Minkowsky lemma, coding theory and the structure of water meet one another in packing and covering theory; quantum fields, crystal defects and mathematical programming profit from homotopy theory; Lie algebras are relevant to filtering; and prediction and electrical engineering can use Stein spaces. And in addition to this there are such new emerging subdisciplines as "completely integrable systems", "chaos, synergetics and large-scale order", which are almost impossible to fit into the existing classification schemes. They draw upon widely different sections of mathematics. This program, Mathematics and Its Applications, is devoted to such (new) interrelations as exempla gratia: - a central concept which plays an important role in several different mathe matical and/or scientific specialized areas; - new applications of the results and ideas from one area of scientific endeavor into another; - influences which the results, problems and concepts of one field of enquiry have and have had on the development of another.

An applications-oriented text detailing the latest research in graph theory and computer science. Leading contributors cover such important topics as: tiling problems and graph factors; partitioning the nodes of a graph; diameter vulnerability in networks; edge-disjoint Hamiltonian cycles; the cochromatic number of graphs in a switching sequence; and more.

Graph theory is becoming increasingly significant as it is applied to other areas of mathematics, science and technology. It is being actively used in fields as varied as biochemistry (genomics), electrical engineering (communication networks and coding theory), computer science (algorithms and computation) and operations research (scheduling). The powerful combinatorial methods found in graph theory have also been used to prove fundamental results in other areas of pure mathematics. This book, besides giving a general outlook of these facts, includes new graph theoretical proofs of Fermat’s Little Theorem and the Nielson-Schreier Theorem. New applications to DNA sequencing (the SNP assembly problem) and computer network security (worm propagation) using minimum vertex covers in graphs are discussed. We also show how to apply edge coloring and matching in graphs for scheduling (the timetabling problem) and vertex coloring in graphs for map coloring and the assignment of frequencies in GSM mobile phone networks. Finally, we revisit the classical problem of finding re-entrant knight’s tours on a chessboard using Hamiltonian circuits in graphs.