The Relaxed Square Property

Graph products are characterized by the existence of non-trivial equivalence relations on the edge set of a graph that satisfy a so-called square property. We investigate here a generalization, termed RSP-relations . The class of graphs with non-trivial RSP-relations in particular includes graph bundles. Furthermore, RSP-relations are intimately related with covering graph constructions. For K 2, 3-free graphs finest RSP-relations can be computed in polynomial-time. In general, however, they are not unique and their number may even grow exponentially. They behave well for graph products, however, in sense that a finest RSP-relation can be obtained easily from finest RSP-relations on the prime factors.