The List Coloring Reconfiguration Problem for Bounded Pathwidth Graphs

We study the problem of transforming one list (vertex) coloring of a graph into another list coloring by changing only one vertex color assignment at a time, while at all times maintaining a list coloring, given a list of allowed colors for each vertex. This problem is known to be PSPACE-complete for bipartite planar graphs. In this paper, we first show that the problem remains PSPACE-complete even for bipartite series-parallel graphs, which form a proper subclass of bipartite planar graphs. We note that our reduction indeed shows the PSPACEcompleteness for graphs with pathwidth two, and it can be extended for threshold graphs. In contrast, we give a polynomial-time algorithm to solve the problem for graphs with pathwidth one. Thus, this paper gives precise analyses of the problem with respect to pathwidth.