Exploiting Automorphisms of Temporal Graphs for Fast Exploration and Rendezvous

Temporal graphs are graphs where the edge set can change in each time step, and the vertex set stays the same. Exploration of temporal graphs whose snapshot in each time step is a connected graph, called connected temporal graphs, has been widely studied. We extend the concept of graph automorphisms from static graphs to temporal graphs and show that symmetries enable faster exploration: We prove that a connected temporal graph with \(n\) vertices and orbit number \(r\) (i.e., \(r\) is the number of automorphism orbits) can be explored in \(O(r n^{1+\epsilon})\) time steps, for any fixed \(\epsilon>0\). For \(r=O(n^c)\) for constant \(c0\). For some connected temporal graphs with constant orbit number we present a complementary lower bound of \(\Omega(n\log n)\) time steps. Finally, we give a randomized algorithm to construct a temporal walk \(W\) that visits all vertices of a given orbit with probability at least \(1-\epsilon\) for any \(0