Editing to a planar graph of given degrees

•We study Deletion to a Planar Graph of Given Degrees and its connected variant.•These problems are known to be NP-complete and W[1]-hard for general graphs.•We construct polynomial kernels for both problems when restricted to planar graphs.

We consider the following graph modification problem. Let the input consist of a graph G=(V,E), a weight function w:V∪E→N, a cost function c:V∪E→N0 and a degree function δ:V→N0, together with three integers kv, ke and C. The question is whether we can delete a set of vertices of total weight at most kv and a set of edges of total weight at most ke so that the total cost of the deleted elements is at most C and every non-deleted vertex v has degree δ(v) in the resulting graph G′. We also consider the variant in which G′ must be connected. Both problems are known to be NP-complete and W[1]-hard when parameterized by kv+ke. We prove that, when restricted to planar graphs, they stay NP-complete but have polynomial kernels when parameterized by kv+ke.