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Advancements on SEFE and Partitioned Book Embedding Problems

In this work we investigate the complexity of some problems related to the {\em Simultaneous Embedding with Fixed Edges} (SEFE) of $k$ planar graphs and the PARTITIONED $k$-PAGE BOOK EMBEDDING (PBE-$k$) problems, which are known to be equivalent under certain conditions. While the computational complexity of SEFE for $k=2$ is still a central open question in Graph Drawing, the problem is NP-complete for $k \geq 3$ [Gassner {\em et al.}, WG '06], even if the intersection graph is the same for each pair of graphs ({\em sunflower intersection}) [Schaefer, JGAA (2013)]. We improve on these results by proving that SEFE with $k \geq 3$ and sunflower intersection is NP-complete even when the intersection graph is a tree and all the input graphs are biconnected. Also, we prove NP-completeness for $k \geq 3$ of problem PBE-$k$ and of problem PARTITIONED T-COHERENT $k$-PAGE BOOK EMBEDDING (PTBE-$k$) - that is the generalization of PBE-$k$ in which the ordering of the vertices on the spine is constrained by a tree $T$ - even when two input graphs are biconnected. Further, we provide a linear-time algorithm for PTBE-$k$ when $k-1$ pages are assigned a connected graph. Finally, we prove that the problem of maximizing the number of edges that are drawn the same in a SEFE of two graphs is NP-complete in several restricted settings ({\em optimization version of SEFE}, Open Problem $9$, Chapter $11$ of the Handbook of Graph Drawing and Visualization).