A unified approach for domination and packing problems in graphs

In this paper, we introduce new concepts of domination and packing functions in graphs, which generalize, respectively, the labeled dominating and packing functions defined by Lee and Chang in 2008, and Hinrichsen et al. in 2019. These generalized functions offer a unified and simpler framework for addressing many of the variations of domination and packing concepts in graphs explored in the literature. Interestingly, their associated optimization problems turn out to be equivalent, providing insight to explain the observed coincidences in computational complexity results for graph classes where both problems, the domination one and its corresponding packing variation, have been analyzed. This equivalence also allows us to solve some computational complexity open questions, for some graph classes. Furthermore, we prove that the generalized problems remain solvable in polynomial time for graphs with bounded clique-width and strongly chordal graphs.