On Cartesian skeletons of graphs

Under suitable conditions of connectivity or non-bipartiteness, each of the three standard graph products (the Cartesian product, the direct product and the strong product) satisfies the unique prime factorization property, and there are polynomial algorithms to determine the prime factors. This is most easily proved for the Cartesian product. For the other products, current proofs involve a notion of a Cartesian skeleton which transfers their multiplication properties to the Cartesian product. The present article introduces simplified definitions of Cartesian skeletons for the direct and strong products, and provides new, fast and transparent algorithms for their construction. Since the complexity of the prime factorization of the direct and the strong product is determined by the complexity of the the construction of the Cartesian skeleton, the new algorithms also improve the complexity of the prime factorizations of graphs with respect to the direct and the strong product. We indicate how these simplifications fit into the existing literature.