The Complexity of Helly-B₁-EPG graph Recognition

Golumbic, Lipshteyn, and Stern defined in 2009 the class of EPG graphs, the intersection graph class of edge paths on a grid. An EPG graph G is a graph that admits a representation where its vertices correspond to paths in a grid Q, such that two vertices of G are adjacent if and only if their corresponding paths in Q have a common edge. If the paths in the representation have at most k bends, we say that it is a B_k-EPG representation. A collection C of sets satisfies the Helly property when every sub-collection of C that is pairwise intersecting has at least one common element. In this paper, we show that given a graph G and an integer k, the problem of determining whether G admits a B_k-EPG representation whose edge-intersections of paths satisfy the Helly property, so-called Helly-B_k-EPG representation, is in NP, for every k bounded by a polynomial function of |V (G)|. Moreover, we show that the problem of recognizing Helly-B1-EPG graphs is NP-complete, and it remains NP-complete even when restricted to 2-apex and 3-degenerate graphs.