Structural Parameterizations for Eternal Vertex Cover

Abstract

Eternal Vertex Cover (EVC) is a turn-based attacker-defender game on an undirected graph $G$. To begin with, the defender places $k$ guards on vertices of $G$. The attacker, on their turn, can choose an edge $e$ not already occupied at both endpoints to "attack". The edge $e$ is defended if a guard moves along the edge $e$. The defender, on their turn, can move any subset of guards. A guard can only move to a neighboring vertex. The minimum number of guards needed to indefinitely defend against any sequence of attacks is called the eternal vertex cover number, generalizing the classic vertex cover number. Determining this number is NP-hard in general, motivating the study of parameterized and approximation algorithms. The problem is known to be FPT when parameterized by the cover number, but structural parameters remain relatively unexplored in the literature. In this work, we explore structural parameterizations for EVC. We show that EVC is FPT parameterized by the cluster vertex deletion number, which generalizes the previously studied parameterization by vertex cover number. We next study the problem parameterized by vertex integrity, which is the smallest number of vertices we need to delete from $G$ so that the resulting graph is a disjoint union of constant-sized components. We first show that Eternal Vertex Cover is XP parameterized by vertex integrity. Then, we develop a polynomial-time approximation algorithm, which computes an additive $6k+1$ ($g(k)$) approximation, where $k$ is equal to the cluster vertex deletion number (vertex integrity). Finally, we show a FPT algorithm for when the deletion set produces "nice" connected components, which are components that are bounded in size and satisfy a technical condition.