Bipartite Dimension - Applications

Applications

The problem of determining the bipartite dimension of a graph appears in various contexts of computing. For instance, in computer systems, different users of a system can be allowed or disallowed accessing various resources. In a role-based access control system, a role provides access rights to a set of resources. A user can own multiple roles, and he has permission to access all resources granted by some of his roles. Also, a role can be owned by multiple users. The role mining problem is to find a minimum set of roles, such that for each user, his roles taken together grant access to all specified resources. The set of users together with the set of resources in the system naturally induces a bipartite graph, whose edges are permissions. Each biclique in this graph is a potential role, and the optimum solutions to the role mining problem are precisely the minimum biclique edge covers (Ene et al. 2008).

A similar scenario is known in computer security, more specifically in secure broadcasting. In that setup, several messages need to be sent each to a set of receivers, over an insecure channel. Each message has to be encrypted using some cryptographic key that is known only to the intended receivers. Each receiver may possess multiple encryption keys, and each key will be distributed to multiple receivers. The optimum key generation problem is to find a minimum set of encryption keys for ensuring secure transmission. As above, the problem can be modeled using a bipartite graph whose minimum biclique edge covers coincide with the solutions to the optimum key generation problem (Shu, Lee & Yannakakis 2006).

A different application lies biology, where minimum biclique edge covers are used in mathematical models of human leukocyte antigen (HLA) serology (Nau et al. 1978).