articulation_points¶

articulation_points(G)[source]¶

Yield the articulation points, or cut vertices, of a graph.

An articulation point or cut vertex is any node whose removal (along with all its incident edges) increases the number of connected components of a graph. An undirected connected graph without articulation points is biconnected. Articulation points belong to more than one biconnected component of a graph.

Notice that by convention a dyad is considered a biconnected component.

Parameters

GNetworkX Graph: An undirected graph.

Yields

node: An articulation point in the graph.

Raises

NetworkXNotImplemented: If the input graph is not undirected.

See also

is_biconnected
biconnected_components
biconnected_component_edges

Notes

The algorithm to find articulation points and biconnected components is implemented using a non-recursive depth-first-search (DFS) that keeps track of the highest level that back edges reach in the DFS tree. A node n is an articulation point if, and only if, there exists a subtree rooted at n such that there is no back edge from any successor of n that links to a predecessor of n in the DFS tree. By keeping track of all the edges traversed by the DFS we can obtain the biconnected components because all edges of a bicomponent will be traversed consecutively between articulation points.

References

1: Hopcroft, J.; Tarjan, R. (1973). “Efficient algorithms for graph manipulation”. Communications of the ACM 16: 372–378. doi:10.1145/362248.362272

Examples

>>> G = nx.barbell_graph(4, 2)
>>> print(nx.is_biconnected(G))
False
>>> len(list(nx.articulation_points(G)))
4
>>> G.add_edge(2, 8)
>>> print(nx.is_biconnected(G))
True
>>> len(list(nx.articulation_points(G)))
0