Well-covered circulant graphs

A graph is well-covered if every independent set can be extended to a maximum independent set. We show that it is co-NP-complete to determine whether an arbitrary graph is well-covered, even when restricted to the family of circulant graphs. Despite the intractability of characterizing the complete set of well-covered circulant graphs, we apply the theory of independence polynomials to show that several families of circulants are indeed well-covered. Since the lexicographic product of two well-covered circulants is also a well-covered circulant, our partial characterization theorems enable us to generate infinitely many families of well-covered circulants previously unknown in the literature. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.