Hereditary classes of graphs: A parametric approach

The world of hereditary classes is rich and diverse and it contains a variety of classes of theoretical and practical importance. Thousands of results in the literature are devoted to individual classes and only a few of them analyse the universe of hereditary classes as a whole. To shift the analysis into a new level, in the present paper we exploit an approach, where we operate by infinite families of classes, rather than individual classes. Each family is associated with a graph parameter and is characterized by classes that are critical with respect to the parameter. In particular, we obtain a complete parametric description of the bottom of the lattice of hereditary classes and discuss a number of open questions related to this approach.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).