Pushing Cops and Robber on graphs of maximum degree four
Cops and Robber is a game played on graphs where a set of cops aim to capture the position of a single robber . The main parameter of interest in this game is the cop number , which is the minimum number of cops that are sufficient to guarantee the capture of the robber. In a directed graph G ⃗ , the push operation on a vertex v reverses the orientation of all arcs incident to v . We consider a variation of the classical Cops and Robber on oriented graphs, where in its turn, each cop can either move to an out-neighbor of its current vertex or push some vertex of the graph, whereas, the robber can move to an out-neighbor in its turn. [Das et al., CALDAM, 2023] introduced this variant and established that if G ⃗ is an orientation of a subcubic graph, then one cop with push ability has a winning strategy. We extend these results to establish that if G ⃗ is an orientation of a 3-degenerate graph, or of a graph with maximum degree 4, then one cop with push ability has a winning strategy. Moreover, we establish that if G ⃗ can be made to be a directed acyclic graph, then one cop with push ability has a winning strategy.
Authors
- Harmender Gahlawat (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7663-6265)
Institutions
- Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (IL)
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
- University of Clermont Auvergne (FR)
- Clermont Université (FR)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Discrete Applied Mathematics
- Published
- 2026-01-13
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dam.2025.12.067
- Primary Topic
- Advanced Graph Theory Research
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00