Complexity of Hamiltonian Cycle Reconfiguration

The Hamiltonian cycle reconfiguration problem asks, given two Hamiltonian cycles C 0 and C t of a graph G, whether there is a sequence of Hamiltonian cycles C 0 , C 1 , … , C t such that C i can be obtained from C i − 1 by a switch for each i with 1 ≤ i ≤ t , where a switch is the replacement of a pair of edges u v and w z on a Hamiltonian cycle with the edges u w and v z of G, given that u w and v z did not appear on the cycle. We show that the Hamiltonian cycle reconfiguration problem is PSPACE-complete, settling an open question posed by Ito et al. (2011) and van den Heuvel (2013). More precisely, we show that the Hamiltonian cycle reconfiguration problem is PSPACE-complete for chordal bipartite graphs, strongly chordal split graphs, and bipartite graphs with maximum degree 6. Bipartite permutation graphs form a proper subclass of chordal bipartite graphs, and unit interval graphs form a proper subclass of strongly chordal graphs. On the positive side, we show that, for any two Hamiltonian cycles of a bipartite permutation graph and a unit interval graph, there is a sequence of switches transforming one cycle to the other, and such a sequence can be obtained in linear time.