Complexity of Firefighting on Graphs

Abstract

We consider a pursuit-evasion game that describes the process of extinguishing a fire burning on the nodes of an undirected graph. We denote the minimum number of firefighters required by ffn(G) and provide almost sharp bounds to this graph parameter for complete binary trees. We show that deciding whether ffn(G) <= m for given G and m is NP-hard. Furthermore, we show that shortest strategies can have superpolynomial length, leaving open whether the problem is in NP. We provide a construction that allows for transferring these results to a well-established Cops and Robbers variant called the "Hunter and Rabbit game".