Strongly Stable and Maximum Weakly Stable Noncrossing Matchings

Abstract

In IWOCA 2019, Ruangwises and Itoh introduced stable noncrossing matchings, where participants of each side are aligned on each of two parallel lines, and no two matching edges are allowed to cross each other. They defined two stability notions, strongly stable noncrossing matching (SSNM) and weakly stable noncrossing matching (WSNM), depending on the strength of blocking pairs. They proved that a WSNM always exists and presented an O(n²) -time algorithm to find one for an instance with n men and n women. They also posed open questions of the complexities of determining existence of an SSNM and finding a largest WSNM. In this paper, we show that both problems are solvable in polynomial time. Our algorithms are applicable to extensions where preference lists may include ties, except for one case which we show to be NP-complete.