Abstract
Computing an invariant of a graph such as treewidth and pathwidth is one of the fundamental problems in graph algorithms. In general, determining the pathwidth of a graph is NP-hard. In this paper, we propose several reduction methods for decreasing the instance size without changing the pathwidth, and implemented the methods together with an exact algorithm for computing pathwidth of graphs. Our experimental results show that the number of vertices in all chemical graphs in NCI database decreases by our reduction methods by 53.81% in average.
