. An independent set of three vertices such that each pair is joined by a path that avoids the neighborhood of the third is called an asteroidal triple. A graph is asteroidal triple-free (AT-free, for short) if it contains no asteroidal triples. The motivation for this investigation was provided, in part, by the fact that the asteroidal triple-free graphs provide a common generalization of interval, permutation, trapezoid, and cocomparability graphs. The main contribution of this work is to investigate and reveal fundamental structural properties of AT-free graphs. Specifically, we show that every connected AT-free graph contains a dominating pair, that is, a pair of vertices such that every path joining them is a dominating set in the graph. We then provide characterizations of AT-free graphs in terms of dominating pairs and minimal triangulations. Subsequently, we state and prove a decomposition theorem for AT-free graphs. An assortment of other properties of AT-free graphs is also p...

An independent set fx; y; zg is called an asteroidal triple if between any pair in the triple there exists a path that avoids the neighborhood of the third. A graph is referred to as AT-free if it does not contain an asteroidal triple. We present a simple linear-time algorithm to compute a dominating path in a connected AT-free graph. Keywords. asteroidal triple-free graphs, domination, algorithms 1 Introduction A number of families of graphs including interval graphs [10], permutation graphs [6], trapezoid graphs [3, 5], and cocomparability graphs [8] feature a type of linear ordering of their vertex sets. It is precisely this linear ordering that is exploited in a search for efficient algorithms on these classes of graphs [2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12]. As it turns out, the classes mentioned above are all subfamilies of a class of graphs called the asteroidal triple-free graphs (AT-free graphs, for short). An independent triple fx; y; zg is called an asteroidal triple if between any p...

An independent set of three of vertices is called an asteroidal triple if between each pair in the triple there exists a path that avoids the neighborhood of the third. A graph is asteroidal triple-free (AT-free, for short) if it contains no asteroidal triple. The motivation for this work is provided, in part, by the fact that AT-free graphs offer a common generalization of interval, permutation, trapezoid, and cocomparability graphs. Previously, the authors have given an existential proof of the fact that every connected AT-free graph contains a dominating pair, that is, a pair of vertices such that every path joining them is a dominating set in the graph. The main contribution of this paper is a constructive proof of the existence of dominating pairs in connected AT-free graphs. The resulting simple algorithm can be implemented to run in time linear in the size of the input, whereas the best algorithm previously known for this problem has complexity O(jV j 3 ) for input...