Tropical dominating sets in vertex-coloured graphs

Abstract Given a vertex-coloured graph, a dominating set is said to be tropical if every colour of the graph appears at least once in the set. Here, we study minimum tropical dominating sets from structural and algorithmic points of view. First, we prove that the tropical dominating set problem is NP-complete even when restricted to a simple path. Then, we establish upper bounds related to various parameters of the graph such as minimum degree and number of edges. We also give an optimal upper bound for random graphs. Last, we give approximability and inapproximability results for general and restricted classes of graphs, and establish a FPT algorithm for interval graphs.