Bounded coloring of co-comparability graphs and the pickup and delivery tour combination problem

In the paper, we show that the PDTC problem can be solved in polynomial time when the number of stacks s is fixed but the size of each stack is not. We build upon the equivalence between the PDTC problem and the bounded coloring (BC) problem on permutation graphs: for the latter problem, s is the number of colors and h is the number of vertices that can get a same color. We show that the BC problem can be solved in polynomial time when s is a fixed constant on co-comparability graphs, a superclass of permutation graphs. To the contrary, the BC problem is known to be hard on permutation graphs when h≥6 is a fixed constant, but s is unbounded.