The Restricted Arc-Width of a Graph

An arc-representation of a graph is a function mapping each vertex in the graph to an arc on the unit circle in such a way that adjacent vertices are mapped to intersecting arcs. The width of such a representation is the maximum number of arcs passing through a single point. The arc-width of a graph is defined to be the minimum width over all of its arc-representations. We extend the work of Barát and Hajnal on this subject and develop a generalization we call restricted arcwidth. Our main results revolve around using this to bound arc-width from below and to examine the effect of several graph operations on arc-width. In particular, we completely describe the effect of disjoint unions and wedge sums while providing tight bounds on the effect of cones.