DOI: 10.7155/jgaa.00136
Bar k-Visibility Graphs
Alice M. Dean , William Evans , Ellen Gethner , Joshua D. Laison , Mohammad Ali Safari , and William T. Trotter
Vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 45-59, 2007. Regular paper

Abstract Let S be a set of horizontal line segments, or bars, in the plane. We say that G is a bar visibility graph, and S its bar visibility representation, if there exists a one-to-one correspondence between vertices of G and bars in S, such that there is an edge between two vertices in G if and only if there exists an unobstructed vertical line of sight between their corresponding bars. If bars are allowed to see through each other, the graphs representable in this way are precisely the interval graphs. We consider representations in which bars are allowed to see through at most k other bars. Since all bar visibility graphs are planar, we seek measurements of closeness to planarity for bar k-visibility graphs. We obtain an upper bound on the number of edges in a bar k-visibility graph. As a consequence, we obtain an upper bound of 12 on the chromatic number of bar 1-visibility graphs, and a tight upper bound of 8 on the size of the largest complete bar 1-visibility graph. We also consider the thickness of bar k-visibility graphs, obtaining an upper bound of 4 when k=1, and a bound that is quadratic in k for k > 1.
Revised: November 2006.
Submitted: August 2005.
Communicated by Sue Whitesides


Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications