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Is there anything known about the hardness of Vertex Cover on the subclass of comparability graphs? In particular, is it known whether the problem is still NP-hard?

Related Results: In "Modular decomposition and transitive orientation, McConnell & Spinrad, 1999" the authors show that the problem lies in P for co-comparability graphs. According to Wikipedia is is also known to lie in P for perfect graphs, but I haven't been able to find any results on comparability graphs.

Henning Koehler
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Vertex cover for comparability graphs is solvable in P-time:

  1. Comparability graphs are (strongly) perfect ("Strongly Perfect Graphs", Berge & Duchet, 1984)
  2. Independent set is P-time on perfect graphs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_graph)
  3. The complement of an independent set is a vertex cover, and vice versa

Independent set for comparability graphs is also listed as "Polynomial" at section "Unweighted problems" on the page of comparability graphs at at ISGCI.

John L.
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Henning Koehler
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