Forts, (fractional) zero forcing, and Cartesian products of graphs

Abstract

The (disjoint) fort number and fractional zero forcing number are introduced and related to existing parameters including the (standard) zero forcing number. The fort hypergraph is introduced and hypergraph results on transversals and matchings are applied to the zero forcing number and fort number. These results are used to establish a Vizing-like lower bound for the zero forcing number of a Cartesian product of graphs for certain families of graphs, and a family of graphs achieving this lower bound is exhibited.