Grid recognition: Classical and parameterized computational perspectives

Over the past few decades, a large body of works studied the (in)tractability of various computational problems on grid graphs, which often yield substantially faster algorithms than general graphs. Unfortunately, the recognition of a grid graph is hard—it was shown to be NP-hard already in 1987. In this paper, we provide several positive results in this regard in the framework of parameterized complexity. Specifically, our contribution is threefold. First, we show that the problem is FPT parameterized by $k+\mathrm{mcc}$ where $\mathrm{mcc}$ is the maximum size of a connected component of G. Second, we present a new parameterization, denoted $a_G$, relating graph distance to geometric distance. We show that the problem is para-NP-hard parameterized by $a_G$, but FPT parameterized by $a_G$ on trees, as well as FPT parameterized by $k+a_G$. Third, we show that the recognition of $k\times r$ grid graphs is NP-hard on graphs of pathwidth 2 where $k=3$.