Kempe equivalence of almost bipartite graphs

Akihiro Higashitani, Naoki Matsumoto

Published 2022-07-27Version 1

Two vertex colorings of a graph are Kempe equivalent if they can be transformed into each other by a sequence of switchings of two colors of vertices. It is PSPACE-complete to determine whether two given vertex $k$-colorings of a graph are Kempe equivalent for any fixed $k\geq 3$, and it is easy to see that every two vertex colorings of any bipartite graph are Kempe equivalent. In this paper, we consider Kempe equivalence of {\it almost} bipartite graphs which can be obtained from a bipartite graph by adding several edges to connect two vertices in the same partite set. We give a conjecture of Kempe equivalence of such graphs, and we prove several partial solutions and best possibility of the conjecture.