Treewidth and minimum fill-in on permutation graphs in linear time

Permutation graphs form a well-studied subclass of cocomparability graphs. Permutation graphs are the cocomparability graphs whose complements are also cocomparability graphs. A triangulation of a graph G is a graph H that is obtained by adding edges to G to make it chordal. If no triangulation of G is a proper subgraph of H then H is called a minimal triangulation. The main theoretical result of the paper is a characterisation of the minimal triangulations of a permutation graph, that also leads to a succinct and linear-time computable representation of the set of minimal triangulations. We apply this representation to devise linear-time algorithms for various minimal triangulation problems on permutation graphs, in particular, we give linear-time algorithms for computing treewidth and minimum fill-in on permutation graphs.