The Local Queue Number of Graphs with Bounded Treewidth

Abstract: A queue layout of a graph $G$ consists of a vertex ordering of $G$ and a partition of the edges into so-called queues such that no two edges in the same queue nest, i.e., have their endpoints ordered in an ABBA-pattern. Continuing the research on local ordered covering numbers, we introduce the local queue number of a graph $G$ as the minimum $\ell$ such that $G$ admits a queue layout with each vertex having incident edges in no more than $\ell$ queues. Similarly to the local page number [Merker, Ueckerdt, GD'19], the local queue number is closely related to the graph's density and can be arbitrarily far from the classical queue number. We present tools to bound the local queue number of graphs from above and below, focusing on graphs of treewidth $k$. Using these, we show that every graph of treewidth $k$ has local queue number at most $k+1$ and that this bound is tight for $k=2$, while a general lower bound is $\lceil k/2\rceil+1$. Our results imply, inter alia, that the maximum local queue number among planar graphs is either 3 or 4.