Hamiltonicity in graphs with few \(P_ 4\)'s (Q1805009)

R. Jamison and S. Olariu developed, starting from an extension of the notion of cograph, a theory of decomposition of graphs into \(P_ 4\)- connected components. It turned out in their work that the algorithmic idea to exploit the unique tree structure of cographs can be generalized to graphs with simple \(P_ 4\)-structure. This paper shows that deciding hamiltonicity and computing the path covering number are easy tasks for \(P_ 4\)-sparse and \(P_ 4\)-extendible graphs.