Chordal bipartite completion of colored graphs Original Research Article

Golumbic, Kaplan, and Shamir [Graph sandwich problems, J. Algorithms 19 (1995) 449–473], in their paper on graph sandwich problems published in 1995, left the status of the sandwich problems for strongly chordal graphs and chordal bipartite graphs open. It was recently shown [C.M.H. de Figueiredo, L. Faria, S. Klein, R. Sritharan, On the complexity of the sandwich problems for strongly chordal graphs and chordal bipartite graphs, Theoret. Comput. Sci., accepted for publication] that the sandwich problem for strongly chordal graphs is NP-complete. We show that given graph G with a proper vertex coloring c, determining whether there is a supergraph of G that is chordal bipartite and also is properly colored by c is NP-complete. This implies that the sandwich problem for chordal bipartite graphs is also NP-complete.