Well-covered graph

In graph theory, a well-covered graph is an undirected graph in which the minimal vertex covers all have the same size. Here, a vertex cover is a set of vertices that touches all edges, and it is minimal if removing any vertex from it would leave some edge uncovered. Equivalently, well-covered graphs are the graphs in which all maximal independent sets have equal size. Well-covered graphs were defined and first studied by Michael D. Plummer in 1970.

The well-covered graphs include all complete graphs, balanced complete bipartite graphs, and the rook's graphs whose vertices represent squares of a chessboard and edges represent moves of a chess rook. Known characterizations of the well-covered cubic graphs, well-covered claw-free graphs, and well-covered graphs of high girth allow these graphs to be recognized in polynomial time, but testing whether other kinds of graph are well-covered is a coNP-complete problem.