Critical hereditary graph classes: a survey

The task of complete complexity dichotomy is to clearly distinguish between easy and hard cases of a given problem on a family of subproblems. We consider this task for some optimization problems restricted to certain classes of graphs closed under deletion of vertices. A concept in the solution process is based on revealing the so-called “critical” graph classes, which play an important role in the complexity analysis for the family. Recent progress in studying such classes is presented in the article.