A Technique for Exact Computation of Precoloring Extension on Interval Graphs

Inspired by a real-life application, we investigate the computationally hard problem of extending a precoloring of an interval graph to a proper coloring under some bound on the number of available colors. We are interested in quickly determining whether or not such an extension exists on instances occurring in practice in connection with campsite bookings on a campground. A naive exhaustive search does not terminate in reasonable time. We have formulated a new approach which moves the computation time within the usable range on all the data samples available to us.