Matching (graph theory)

In the mathematical discipline of graph theory, a matching or independent edge set in an undirected graph is a set of edges without common vertices. In other words, a subset of the edges is a matching if each vertex appears in at most one edge of that matching. Finding a matching in a bipartite graph can be treated as a network flow problem. Given a graph G = (V, E), a matching M in G is a set of pairwise non-adjacent edges, none of which are loops; that is, no two edges share common vertices. A vertex is matched (or saturated) if it is an endpoint of one of the edges in the matching. Otherwise the vertex is unmatched (or unsaturated). A maximal matching is a matching M of a graph G that is not a subset of any other matching. A matching M of a graph G is maximal if every edge in G has a non-empty intersection with at least one edge in M. The following figure shows examples of maximal matchings (red) in three graphs. A maximum matching (also known as maximum-cardinality matching) is a matching that contains the largest possible number of edges. There may be many maximum matchings. The matching number of a graph G is the size of a maximum matching. Every maximum matching is maximal, but not every maximal matching is a maximum matching. The following figure shows examples of maximum matchings in the same three graphs. A perfect matching is a matching that matches all vertices of the graph. That is, a matching is perfect if every vertex of the graph is incident to an edge of the matching. A matching is perfect if |E|=|V|/2. Every perfect matching is maximum and hence maximal. In some literature, the term complete matching is used. In the above figure, only part (b) shows a perfect matching. A perfect matching is also a minimum-size edge cover. Thus, the size of a maximum matching is no larger than the size of a minimum edge cover: \nu(G) \le \rho(G). A graph can only contain a perfect matching when the graph has an even number of vertices. A near-perfect matching is one in which exactly one vertex is unmatched.