Reconfiguring Minimum Dominating Sets in Trees

We provide tight bounds on the diameter of γ-graphs, which are reconfiguration graphs of the minimum dominating sets of a graph G. In particular, we prove that for any tree T of order n ≥ 3, the diameter of its γ-graph is at most n/2 in the single vertex replacement adjacency model, whereas in the slide adjacency model, it is at most 2(n − 1)/3. Our proof is constructive, leading to a simple linear-time algorithm for determining the optimal sequence of “moves” between two minimum dominating sets of a tree.